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• 1 2026-06-17T13:08:00+00:00 Rudyard Kipling, "William the Conqueror" (1898) 1 Short story by Rudyard Kipling. Deals with the British response to a famine plain 2026-06-17T13:08:00+00:00 This short story was included in Rudyard Kipling's collection, The Day's Work, published in 1898. 
  
  
  WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
  
  PART I
  
  
  I have done one braver thing
      Than all the worthies did;
  And yet a braver thence doth spring,
      Which is to keep that hid.
  
                      THE UNDERTAKING.
  
  
  “Is it officially declared yet?”
  
  “They’ve gone as far as to admit ‘extreme local scarcity,’ and they’ve
  started relief-works in one or two districts, the paper says.”
  
  “That means it will be declared as soon as they can make sure of the
  men and the rolling-stock. Shouldn’t wonder if it were as bad as the
  ’78 Famine.”
  
  “Can’t be,” said Scott, turning a little in the long cane chair.
  
  “We’ve had fifteen-anna crops in the north, and Bombay and Bengal
  report more than they know what to do with. They’ll be able to check it
  before it gets out of hand. It will only be local.”
  
  Martyn picked the “_Pioneer_” from the table, read through the
  telegrams once more, and put up his feet on the chair-rests. It was a
  hot, dark, breathless evening, heavy with the smell of the newly
  watered Mall. The flowers in the Club gardens were dead and black on
  their stalks, the little lotus-pond was a circle of caked mud, and the
  tamarisk-trees were white with the dust of weeks. Most of the men were
  at the band-stand in the public gardens—from the Club verandah you
  could hear the native Police band hammering stale waltzes—or on the
  polo-ground, or in the high-walled fives-court, hotter than a Dutch
  oven. Half a dozen grooms, squatted at the heads of their ponies,
  waited their masters’ return. From time to time a man would ride at a
  foot-pace into the Club compound, and listlessly loaf over to the
  whitewashed barracks beside the main building. These were supposed to
  be chambers. Men lived in them, meeting the same white faces night
  after night at dinner, and drawing out their office-work till the
  latest possible hour, that they might escape that doleful company.
  
  “What are you going to do?” said Martyn, with a yawn. “Let’s have a
  swim before dinner.”
  
  “Water’s hot. I was at the bath to-day.”
  
  “Play you game o’ billiards—fifty up.”
  
  “It’s a hundred and five in the hall now. Sit still and don’t be so
  abominably energetic.”
  
  A grunting camel swung up to the porch, his badged and belted rider
  fumbling a leather pouch.
  
  “Kubber-kargaz-ki-yektraaa,” the man whined, handing down the
  newspaper extra—a slip printed on one side only, and damp from the
  press. It was pinned up on the green-baize board, between notices of
  ponies for sale and fox-terriers missing.
  
  Martyn rose lazily, read it, and whistled. “It’s declared!” he cried.
  “One, two, three—eight districts go under the operations of the Famine
  Code _ek dum_. They’ve put Jimmy Hawkins in charge.”
  
  “Good business!” said Scott, with the first sign of interest he had
  shown. “When in doubt hire a Punjabi. I worked under Jimmy when I first
  came out and he belonged to the Punjab. He has more bundobust than
  most men.”
  
  “Jimmy’s a Jubilee Knight now,” said Martyn. “He’s a good chap, even
  though he is a thrice-born civilian and went to the Benighted
  Presidency. What unholy names these Madras districts rejoice in—all
  _ungas_ or _rungas_ or _pillays_ or _polliums_.”
  
  A dog-cart drove up in the dusk, and a man entered, mopping his head.
  He was editor of the one daily paper at the capital of a Province of
  twenty-five million natives and a few hundred white men: as his staff
  was limited to himself and one assistant, his office-hours ran
  variously from ten to twenty a day.
  
  “Hi, Raines; you’re supposed to know everything,” said Martyn, stopping
  him. “How’s this Madras ‘scarcity’ going to turn out?”
  
  “No one knows as yet. There’s a message as long as your arm coming in
  on the telephone. I’ve left my cub to fill it out. Madras has owned she
  can’t manage it alone, and Jimmy seems to have a free hand in getting
  all the men he needs. Arbuthnot’s warned to hold himself in readiness.”
  
  “‘Badger’ Arbuthnot?”
  
  “The Peshawur chap. Yes: and the _Pi_ wires that Ellis and Clay have
  been moved from the Northwest already, and they’ve taken half a dozen
  Bombay men, too. It’s pukka famine, by the looks of it.”
  
  “They’re nearer the scene of action than we are; but if it comes to
  indenting on the Punjab this early, there’s more in this than meets the
  eye,” said Martyn.
  
  “Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Didn’t come to stay for ever,” said
  Scott, dropping one of Marryat’s novels, and rising to his feet.
  “Martyn, your sister’s waiting for you.”
  
  A rough grey horse was backing and shifting at the edge of the
  verandah, where the light of a kerosene lamp fell on a brown-calico
  habit and a white face under a grey-felt hat.
  
  “Right, O!” said Martyn. “I’m ready. Better come and dine with us, if
  you’ve nothing to do, Scott. William, is there any dinner in the
  house?”
  
  “I’ll go home and see,” was the rider’s answer. “You can drive him
  over—at eight, remember.”
  
  Scott moved leisurely to his room, and changed into the evening-dress
  of the season and the country: spotless white linen from head to foot,
  with a broad silk _cummerbund_. Dinner at the Martyns’ was a decided
  improvement on the goat-mutton, twiney-tough fowl, and tinned entrées
  of the Club. But it was a great pity that Martyn could not afford to
  send his sister to the hills for the hot weather. As an Acting District
  Superintendent of Police, Martyn drew the magnificent pay of six
  hundred depreciated silver rupees a month, and his little four-roomed
  bungalow said just as much. There were the usual blue-and-white-striped
  jail-made rugs on the uneven floor; the usual glass-studded Amritsar
  _phulkaris_ draped on nails driven into the flaking whitewash of the
  walls; the usual half-dozen chairs that did not match, picked up at
  sales of dead men’s effects; and the usual streaks of black grease
  where the leather punka-thong ran through the wall. It was as though
  everything had been unpacked the night before to be repacked next
  morning. Not a door in the house was true on its hinges. The little
  windows, fifteen feet up, were darkened with wasp-nests, and lizards
  hunted flies between the beams of the wood-ceiled roof. But all this
  was part of Scott’s life. Thus did people live who had such an income;
  and in a land where each man’s pay, age, and position are printed in a
  book, that all may read, it is hardly worth while to play at pretence
  in word or deed. Scott counted eight years’ service in the Irrigation
  Department, and drew eight hundred rupees a month, on the understanding
  that if he served the State faithfully for another twenty-two years he
  could retire on a pension of some four hundred rupees a month. His
  working-life, which had been spent chiefly under canvas or in temporary
  shelters where a man could sleep, eat, and write letters, was bound up
  with the opening and guarding of irrigation canals, the handling of two
  or three thousand workmen of all castes and creeds, and the payment of
  vast sums of coined silver.
  
  He had finished that spring, not without credit, the last section of
  the great Mosuhl Canal, and—much against his will, for he hated
  office-work—had been sent in to serve during the hot weather on the
  accounts and supply side of the Department, with sole charge of the
  sweltering sub-office at the capital of the Province. Martyn knew this;
  William, his sister, knew it; and everybody knew it. Scott knew, too,
  as well as the rest of the world, that Miss Martyn had come out to
  India four years ago to keep house for her brother, who, as every one
  knew, had borrowed the money to pay for her passage, and that she
  ought, as all the world said, to have married at once. In stead of
  this, she had refused some half a dozen subalterns, a Civilian twenty
  years her senior, one Major, and a man in the Indian Medical
  Department. This, too, was common property. She had “stayed down three
  hot weathers,” as the saying is, because her brother was in debt and
  could not afford the expense of her keep at even a cheap hill-station.
  Therefore her face was white as bone, and in the centre of her forehead
  was a big silvery scar about the size of a shilling—the mark of a Delhi
  sore, which is the same as a “Bagdad date.” This comes from drinking
  bad water, and slowly eats into the flesh till it is ripe enough to be
  burned out.
  
  None the less William had enjoyed herself hugely in her four years.
  Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river; once she had
  been run away with on a camel; had witnessed a midnight attack of
  thieves on her brother’s camp; had seen justice administered, with long
  sticks, in the open under trees; could speak Urdu and even rough
  Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her seniors; had entirely
  fallen out of the habit of writing to her aunts in England, or cutting
  the pages of the English magazines; had been through a very bad cholera
  year, seeing sights unfit to be told; and had wound up her experiences
  by six weeks of typhoid fever, during which her head had been shaved
  and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September. It is
  conceivable that the aunts would not have approved of a girl who never
  set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances
  with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and
  curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of
  William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the
  vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo,
  rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases,
  and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—even after they
  had proposed to her and been rejected.
  
  “I like men who do things,” she had confided to a man in the
  Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth-merchants
  and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth’s “Excursion” in annotated
  cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she
  “didn’t understand poetry very much; it made her head ache,” and
  another broken heart took refuge at the Club. But it was all William’s
  fault. She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is
  the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.
  
  Scott had known her for some three years, meeting her, as a rule, under
  canvass, when his camp and her brother’s joined for a day on the edge
  of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several times at the big
  Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred white people came in
  to the station; and had always a great respect for her housekeeping and
  her dinners.
  
  She looked more like a boy than ever when, the meal ended, she sat,
  rolling cigarettes, her low forehead puckered beneath the dark curls as
  she twiddled the papers and stuck out her rounded chin when the tobacco
  stayed in place, or, with a gesture as true as a school-boy’s throwing
  a stone, tossed the finished article across the room to Martyn, who
  caught it with one hand, and continued his talk with Scott. It was all
  “shop,”—canals and the policing of canals; the sins of villagers who
  stole more water than they had paid for, and the grosser sin of native
  constables who connived at the thefts; of the transplanting bodily of
  villages to newly irrigated ground, and of the coming fight with the
  desert in the south when the Provincial funds should warrant the
  opening of the long-surveyed Luni Protective Canal System. And Scott
  spoke openly of his great desire to be put on one particular section of
  the work where he knew the land and the people; and Martyn sighed for a
  billet in the Himalayan foot-hills, and said his mind of his superiors,
  and William rolled cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on
  her brother because he was happy.
  
  At ten Scott’s horse came to the door, and the evening was ended. The
  lights of the two low bungalows in which the daily paper was printed
  showed bright across the road. It was too early to try to find sleep,
  and Scott drifted over to the editor. Raines, stripped to the waist
  like a sailor at a gun, lay half asleep in a long chair, waiting for
  night telegrams. He had a theory that if a man did not stay by his work
  all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever: so he ate
  and slept among his files.
  
  “Can you do it?” he said drowsily. “I didn’t mean to bring you over.”
  
  “About what? I’ve been dining at the Martyns’.”
  
  “The Madras famine, of course. Martyn’s warned, too. They’re taking men
  where they can find ’em. I sent a note to you at the Club just now,
  asking if you could do us a letter once a week from the south—between
  two and three columns, say. Nothing sensational, of course, but just
  plain facts about who is doing what, and so forth. Our regular
  rates—ten rupees a column.”
  
  “Sorry, but it’s out of my line,” Scott answered, staring absently at
  the map of India on the wall. “It’s rough on Martyn—very. Wonder what
  he’ll do with his sister? Wonder what the deuce they’ll do with me?
  I’ve no famine experience. This is the first I’ve heard of it. _Am_ I
  ordered?”
  
  “Oh, yes. Here’s the wire. They’ll put you on to relief-works,” Raines
  said, “with a horde of Madrassis dying like flies; one native
  apothecary and half a pint of cholera-mixture among the ten thousand of
  you. It comes of your being idle for the moment. Every man who isn’t
  doing two men’s work seems to have been called upon. Hawkins evidently
  believes in Punjabis. It’s going to be quite as bad as anything they
  have had in the last ten years.”
  
  “It’s all in the day’s work, worse luck. I suppose I shall get my
  orders officially some time to-morrow. I’m awfully glad I happened to
  drop in. Better go and pack my kit now. Who relieves me here—do you
  know?”
  
  Raines turned over a sheaf of telegrams. “McEuan,” said he, “from
  Murree.”
  
  Scott chuckled. “He thought he was going to be cool all summer. He’ll
  be very sick about this. Well, no good talking. ’Night.”
  
  Two hours later, Scott, with a clear conscience, laid himself down to
  rest on a string cot in a bare room. Two worn bullock trunks, a leather
  water-bottle, a tin ice-box, and his pet saddle sewed up in sacking
  were piled at the door, and the Club secretary’s receipt for last
  month’s bill was under his pillow. His orders came next morning, and
  with them an unofficial telegram from Sir James Hawkins; who was not in
  the habit of forgetting good men when he had once met them, bidding him
  report himself with all speed at some unpronounceable place fifteen
  hundred miles to the south, for the famine was sore in the land, and
  white men were needed.
  
  A pink and fattish youth arrived in the red-hot noonday, whimpering a
  little at fate and famines, which never allowed any one three months’
  peace. He was Scott’s successor—another cog in the machinery, moved
  forward behind his fellow whose services, as the official announcement
  ran, “were placed at the disposal of the Madras Government for famine
  duty until further orders.” Scott handed over the funds in his charge,
  showed him the coolest corner in the office, warned him against excess
  of zeal, and, as twilight fell, departed from the Club in a hired
  carriage, with his faithful body-servant, Faiz Ullah, and a mound of
  disordered baggage atop, to catch the southern mail at the loopholed
  and bastioned railway-station. The heat from the thick brick walls
  struck him across the face as if it had been a hot towel; and he
  reflected that there were at least five nights and four days of this
  travel before him. Faiz Ullah, used to the chances of service, plunged
  into the crowd on the stone platform, while Scott, a black cheroot
  between his teeth, waited till his compartment should be set away. A
  dozen native policemen, with their rifles and bundles, shouldered into
  the press of Punjabi farmers, Sikh craftsmen, and greasy-locked
  Afreedee pedlars, escorting with all pomp Martyn’s uniform-case,
  water-bottles, ice-box, and bedding-roll. They saw Faiz Ullah’s lifted
  hand, and steered for it.
  
  “My Sahib and your Sahib,” said Faiz Ullah to Martyn’s man, “will
  travel together. Thou and I, O brother, will thus secure the servants’
  places close by; and because of our masters’ authority none will dare
  to disturb us.”
  
  When Faiz Ullah reported all things ready, Scott settled down at full
  length, coatless and bootless, on the broad leather-covered bunk. The
  heat under the iron-arched roof of the station might have been anything
  over a hundred degrees. At the last moment Martyn entered, dripping.
  
  “Don’t swear,” said Scott, lazily; “it’s too late to change your
  carriage; and we’ll divide the ice.”
  
  “What are you doing here?” said the police-man.
  
  “I’m lent to the Madras Government, same as you. By Jove, it’s a bender
  of a night! Are you taking any of your men down?”
  
  “A dozen. I suppose I shall have to superintend relief distributions.
  Didn’t know you were under orders too.”
  
  “I didn’t till after I left you last night. Raines had the news first.
  My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and I got off
  at once. Shouldn’t wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing—this famine—if
  we come through it alive.”
  
  “Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together,” said Martyn; and
  then, after a pause: “My sister’s here.”
  
  “Good business,” said Scott, heartily. “Going to get off at Umballa, I
  suppose, and go up to Simla. Who’ll she stay with there?”
  
  “No-o; that’s just the trouble of it. She’s going down with me.”
  
  Scott sat bolt upright under the oil-lamps as the train jolted past
  Tarn-Taran. “What! You don’t mean you couldn’t afford—”
  
  “’Tain’t that. I’d have scraped up the money somehow.”
  
  “You might have come to me, to begin with,” said Scott, stiffly; “we
  aren’t altogether strangers.”
  
  “Well, you needn’t be stuffy about it. I might, but—you don’t know my
  sister. I’ve been explaining and exhorting and all the rest of it all
  day—lost my temper since seven this morning, and haven’t got it back
  yet—but she wouldn’t hear of any compromise. A woman’s entitled to
  travel with her husband if she wants to; and William says she’s on the
  same footing. You see, we’ve been together all our lives, more or less,
  since my people died. It isn’t as if she were an ordinary sister.”
  
  “All the sisters I’ve ever heard of would have stayed where they were
  well off.”
  
  “She’s as clever as a man, confound her,” Martyn went on. “She broke up
  the bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. Settled the whole
  _subchiz_ [outfit] in three hours—servants, horses, and all. I didn’t
  get my orders till nine.”
  
  “Jimmy Hawkins won’t be pleased,” said Scott. “A famine’s no place for
  a woman.”
  
  “Mrs. Jim—I mean Lady Jim’s in camp with him. At any rate, she says she
  will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own
  responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from
  under me by showing me her answer.”
  
  Scott laughed aloud. “If she can do that she can take care of herself,
  and Mrs. Jim won’t let her run into any mischief. There aren’t many
  women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine with their eyes
  open. It isn’t as if she didn’t know what these things mean. She was
  through the Jalo cholera last year.”
  
  The train stopped at Amritsar, and Scott went back to the ladies’
  compartment, immediately behind their carriage. William, with a cloth
  riding-cap on her curls, nodded affably.
  
  “Come in and have some tea,” she said. “Best thing in the world for
  heat-apoplexy.”
  
  “Do I look as if I were going to have heat-apoplexy?”
  
  “Never can tell,” said William, wisely. “It’s always best to be ready.”
  
  She had arranged her compartment with the knowledge of an old
  campaigner. A felt-covered water-bottle hung in the draught of one of
  the shuttered windows; a tea-set of Russian china, packed in a wadded
  basket, stood on the seat; and a travelling spirit-lamp was clamped
  against the woodwork above it.
  
  William served them generously, in large cups, hot tea, which saves the
  veins of the neck from swelling inopportunely on a hot night. It was
  characteristic of the girl that, her plan of action once settled, she
  asked for no comments on it. Life among men who had a great deal of
  work to do, and very little time to do it in, had taught her the wisdom
  of effacing, as well as of fending for, herself. She did not by word or
  deed suggest that she would be useful, comforting, or beautiful in
  their travels, but continued about her business serenely: put the cups
  back without clatter when tea was ended, and made cigarettes for her
  guests.
  
  “This time last night,” said Scott, “we didn’t expect—er—this kind of
  thing, did we?”
  
  “I’ve learned to expect anything,” said William. “You know, in our
  service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this
  ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally—if we live.”
  
  “It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,” Scott replied,
  with equal gravity. “I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works
  this cold weather, but there’s no saying how long the famine may keep
  us.”
  
  “Hardly beyond October, I should think,” said Martyn. “It will be
  ended, one way or the other, then.”
  
  “And we’ve nearly a week of this,” said William. “Sha’n’t we be dusty
  when it’s over?”
  
  For a night and a day they knew their surroundings, and for a night and
  a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge
  railway, they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they
  had come by that road from Bombay. Then the languages in which the
  names of the stations were written changed, and they launched south
  into a foreign land, where the very smells were new. Many long and
  heavily laden grain-trains were in front of them, and they could feel
  the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporised
  sidings while processions of empty trucks returned to the north, and
  were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight,
  Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot, and they walked to and fro
  among sacks, and dogs howled. Then they came to an India more strange
  to them than to the untravelled Englishman—the flat, red India of
  palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice—the India of the picture-books, of
  “_Little Henry and His Bearer_”—all dead and dry in the baking heat.
  They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far
  and far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train,
  holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be
  left behind, the men and women clustering round it like ants by spilled
  honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a regiment of
  little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder; and when the
  train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived that the
  burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up beside dead
  oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met more white men, here
  one and there two, whose tents stood close to the line, and who came
  armed with written authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They
  were too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare
  curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and watch
  how her men staved off the rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting
  them down three at a time in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the
  marked trucks, or taking receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white
  men, who spoke another argot than theirs. They ran out of ice, out of
  soda-water, and out of tea; for they were six days and seven nights on
  the road, and it seemed to them like seven times seven years.
  
  At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red fires
  of railway-sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they came to
  their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of the Famine,
  unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command of affairs.
  
  Martyn, he decreed then and there, was to live on trains till further
  orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with starving
  people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp on the edge
  of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and return, and his
  constables would guard the loaded grain-cars, also picking up people,
  and would drop them at a camp a hundred miles south. Scott—Hawkins was
  very glad to see Scott again—would that same hour take charge of a
  convoy of bullock-carts, and would go south, feeding as he went, to yet
  another famine-camp, where he would leave his starving—there would be
  no lack of starving on the route—and wait for orders by telegraph.
  Generally, Scott was in all small things to act as he thought best.
  
  William bit her under lip. There was no one in the wide world like her
  one brother, but Martyn’s orders gave him no discretion.
  
  She came out on the platform, masked with dust from head to foot, a
  horse-shoe wrinkle on her forehead, put here by much thinking during
  the past week, but as self-possessed as ever. Mrs. Jim—who should have
  been Lady Jim but that no one remembered the title—took possession of
  her with a little gasp.
  
  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she almost sobbed. “You oughtn’t to, of
  course, but there—there isn’t another woman in the place, and we must
  help each other, you know; and we’ve all the wretched people and the
  little babies they are selling.”
  
  “I’ve seen some,” said William.
  
  “Isn’t it ghastly? I’ve bought twenty; they’re in our camp; but won’t
  you have something to eat first? We’ve more than ten people can do
  here; and I’ve got a horse for you. Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, dear.
  You’re a Punjabi, too, you know.”
  
  “Steady, Lizzie,” said Hawkins, over his shoulder. “We’ll look after
  you, Miss Martyn. Sorry I can’t ask you to breakfast, Martyn. You’ll
  have to eat as you go. Leave two of your men to help Scott. These poor
  devils can’t stand up to load carts. Saunders” (this to the
  engine-driver, who was half asleep in the cab), “back down and get
  those empties away. You’ve ‘line clear’ to Anundrapillay; they’ll give
  you orders north of that. Scott, load up your carts from that B. P. P.
  truck, and be off as soon as you can. The Eurasian in the pink shirt is
  your interpreter and guide. You’ll find an apothecary of sorts tied to
  the yoke of the second wagon. He’s been trying to bolt; you’ll have to
  look after him. Lizzie, drive Miss Martyn to camp, and tell them to
  send the red horse down here for me.”
  
  Scott, with Faiz Ullah and two policemen, was already busied with the
  carts, backing them up to the truck and unbolting the sideboards
  quietly, while the others pitched in the bags of millet and wheat.
  Hawkins watched him for as long as it took to fill one cart.
  
  “That’s a good man,” he said. “If all goes well I shall work him hard.”
  This was Jim Hawkins’s notion of the highest compliment one human being
  could pay another.
  
  An hour later Scott was under way; the apothecary threatening him with
  the penalties of the law for that he, a member of the Subordinate
  Medical Department, had been coerced and bound against his will and all
  laws governing the liberty of the subject; the pink-shirted Eurasian
  begging leave to see his mother, who happened to be dying some three
  miles away: “Only verree, verree short leave of absence, and will
  presently return, sar—“; the two constables, armed with staves,
  bringing up the rear; and Faiz Ullah, a Mohammedan’s contempt for all
  Hindoos and foreigners in every line of his face, explaining to the
  drivers that though Scott Sahib was a man to be feared on all fours,
  he, Faiz Ullah, was Authority Itself.
  
  The procession creaked past Hawkins’s camp—three stained tents under a
  clump of dead trees, behind them the famine-shed, where a crowd of
  hopeless ones tossed their arms around the cooking-kettles.
  
  “Wish to Heaven William had kept out of it,” said Scott to himself,
  after a glance. “We’ll have cholera, sure as a gun, when the Rains
  break.”
  
  But William seemed to have taken kindly to the operations of the Famine
  Code, which, when famine is declared, supersede the workings of the
  ordinary law. Scott saw her, the centre of a mob of weeping women, in a
  calico riding-habit, and a blue-grey felt hat with a gold puggaree.
  
  “I want fifty rupees, please. I forgot to ask Jack before he went away.
  Can you lend it me? It’s for condensed-milk for the babies,” said she.
  
  Scott took the money from his belt, and handed it over without a word.
  “For goodness sake, take care of yourself,” he said.
  
  “Oh, I shall be all right. We ought to get the milk in two days. By the
  way, the orders are, I was to tell you, that you’re to take one of Sir
  Jim’s horses. There’s a grey Cabuli here that I thought would be just
  your style, so I’ve said you’d take him. Was that right?”
  
  “That’s awfully good of you. We can’t either of us talk much about
  style, I am afraid.”
  
  Scott was in a weather-stained drill shooting-kit, very white at the
  seams and a little frayed at the wrists. William regarded him
  thoughtfully, from his pith helmet to his greased ankle-boots. “You
  look very nice, I think. Are you sure you’ve everything you’ll
  need—quinine, chlorodyne, and so on?”
  
  “Think so,” said Scott, patting three or four of his shooting-pockets
  as he mounted and rode alongside his convoy.
  
  “Good-bye,” he cried.
  
  “Good-bye, and good luck,” said William. “I’m awfully obliged for the
  money.” She turned on a spurred heel and disappeared into the tent,
  while the carts pushed on past the famine-sheds, past the roaring lines
  of the thick, fat fires, down to the baked Gehenna of the South.
  
  
  
  
  PART II
  
  
  So let us melt and make no noise,
      No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
  ’Twere profanation of our joys
      To tell the Laity our love.
  
                      A VALEDICTION.
  
  
  It was punishing work, even though he travelled by night and camped by
  day; but within the limits of his vision there was no man whom Scott
  could call master. He was as free as Jimmy Hawkins—freer, in fact, for
  the Government held the Head of the Famine tied neatly to a
  telegraph-wire, and if Jimmy had ever regarded telegrams seriously, the
  death-rate of that famine would have been much higher than it was.
  
  At the end of a few days’ crawling Scott learned something of the size
  of the India which he served, and it astonished him. His carts, as you
  know, were loaded with wheat, millet, and barley, good food-grains
  needing only a little grinding. But the people to whom he brought the
  life-giving stuffs were rice-eaters. They could hull rice in their
  mortars, but they knew nothing of the heavy stone querns of the North,
  and less of the material that the white man convoyed so laboriously.
  They clamoured for rice—unhusked paddy, such as they were accustomed
  to—and, when they found that there was none, broke away weeping from
  the sides of the cart. What was the use of these strange hard grains
  that choked their throats? They would die. And then and there very many
  of them kept their word. Others took their allowance, and bartered
  enough millet to feed a man through a week for a few handfuls of rotten
  rice saved by some less unfortunate. A few put their share into the
  rice-mortars, pounded it, and made a paste with foul water; but they
  were very few. Scott understood dimly that many people in the India of
  the South ate rice, as a rule, but he had spent his service in a grain
  Province, had seldom seen rice in the blade or ear, and least of all
  would have believed that in time of deadly need men could die at arm’s
  length of plenty, sooner than touch food they did not know. In vain the
  interpreters interpreted; in vain his two policemen showed in vigorous
  pantomime what should be done. The starving crept away to their bark
  and weeds, grubs, leaves, and clay, and left the open sacks untouched.
  But sometimes the women laid their phantoms of children at Scott’s
  feet, looking back as they staggered away.
  
  Faiz Ullah opined it was the will of God that these foreigners should
  die, and it remained only to give orders to burn the dead. None the
  less there was no reason why the Sahib should lack his comforts, and
  Faiz Ullah, a campaigner of experience, had picked up a few lean goats
  and had added them to the procession. That they might give milk for the
  morning meal, he was feeding them on the good grain that these
  imbeciles rejected. “Yes,” said Faiz Ullah; “if the Sahib thought fit,
  a little milk might be given to some of the babies”; but, as the Sahib
  well knew, babies were cheap, and, for his own part, Faiz Ullah held
  that there was no Government order as to babies. Scott spoke forcefully
  to Faiz Ullah and the two policemen, and bade them capture goats where
  they could find them. This they most joyfully did, for it was a
  recreation, and many ownerless goats were driven in. Once fed, the poor
  brutes were willing enough to follow the carts, and a few days’ good
  food—food such as human beings died for lack of—set them in milk again.
  
  “But I am no goatherd,” said Faiz Ullah. “It is against my _izzat_ [my
  honour].”
  
  “When we cross the Bias River again we will talk of _izzat_,” Scott
  replied. “Till that day thou and the policemen shall be sweepers to the
  camp, if I give the order.”
  
  “Thus, then, it is done,” grunted Faiz Ullah, “if the Sahib will have
  it so”; and he showed how a goat should be milked, while Scott stood
  over him.
  
  “Now we will feed them,” said Scott; “twice a day we will feed them”;
  and he bowed his back to the milking, and took a horrible cramp.
  
  When you have to keep connection unbroken between a restless mother of
  kids and a baby who is at the point of death, you suffer in all your
  system. But the babies were fed. Each morning and evening Scott would
  solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags under
  the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than
  breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by
  drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats
  were fed; and since they would straggle without a leader, and since the
  natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace
  slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating his step to their
  weaknesses. All this was sufficiently absurd, and he felt the absurdity
  keenly; but at least he was saving life, and when the women saw that
  their children did not die, they made shift to eat a little of the
  strange foods, and crawled after the carts, blessing the master of the
  goats.
  
  “Give the women something to live for,” said Scott to himself, as he
  sneezed in the dust of a hundred little feet, “and they’ll hang on
  somehow. This beats William’s condensed-milk trick all to pieces. I
  shall never live it down, though.”
  
  He reached his destination very slowly, found that a rice-ship had come
  in from Burmah, and that stores of paddy were available; found also an
  overworked Englishman in charge of the shed, and, loading the carts,
  set back to cover the ground he had already passed. He left some of the
  children and half his goats at the famine-shed. For this he was not
  thanked by the Englishman, who had already more stray babies than he
  knew what to do with. Scott’s back was suppled to stooping now, and he
  went on with his wayside ministrations in addition to distributing the
  paddy. More babies and more goats were added unto him; but now some of
  the babies wore rags, and beads round their wrists or necks. “_That_”
  said the interpreter, as though Scott did not know, “signifies that
  their mothers hope in eventual contingency to resume them offeecially.”
  
  “The sooner, the better,” said Scott; but at the same time he marked,
  with the pride of ownership, how this or that little Ramasawmy was
  putting on flesh like a bantam. As the paddy-carts were emptied he
  headed for Hawkins’s camp by the railway, timing his arrival to fit in
  with the dinner-hour, for it was long since he had eaten at a cloth. He
  had no desire to make any dramatic entry, but an accident of the sunset
  ordered it that when he had taken off his helmet to get the evening
  breeze, the low light should fall across his forehead, and he could not
  see what was before him; while one waiting at the tent door beheld with
  new eyes a young man, beautiful as Paris, a god in a halo of golden
  dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran
  small naked Cupids. But she laughed—William, in a slate-coloured
  blouse, laughed consumedly till Scott, putting the best face he could
  upon the matter, halted his armies and bade her admire the
  kindergarten. It was an unseemly sight, but the proprieties had been
  left ages ago, with the tea-party at Amritsar Station, fifteen hundred
  miles to the north.
  
  “They are coming on nicely,” said William. “We’ve only five-and-twenty
  here now. The women are beginning to take them away again.”
  
  “Are you in charge of the babies, then?”
  
  “Yes—Mrs. Jim and I. We didn’t think of goats, though. We’ve been
  trying condensed-milk and water.”
  
  “Any losses?”
  
  “More than I care to think of;” said William, with a shudder. “And
  you?”
  
  Scott said nothing. There had been many little burials along his
  route—one cannot burn a dead baby—many mothers who had wept when they
  did not find again the children they had trusted to the care of the
  Government.
  
  Then Hawkins came out carrying a razor, at which Scott looked hungrily,
  for he had a beard that he did not love. And when they sat down to
  dinner in the tent he told his tale in few words, as it might have been
  an official report. Mrs. Jim snuffled from time to time, and Jim bowed
  his head judicially; but William’s grey eyes were on the clean-shaven
  face, and it was to her that Scott seemed to appeal.
  
  “Good for the Pauper Province!” said William, her chin on her hand, as
  she leaned forward among the wine-glasses. Her cheeks had fallen in,
  and the scar on her forehead was more prominent than ever, but the
  well-turned neck rose roundly as a column from the ruffle of the blouse
  which was the accepted evening-dress in camp.
  
  “It was awfully absurd at times,” said Scott. “You see, I didn’t know
  much about milking or babies. They’ll chaff my head off, if the tale
  goes up North.”
  
  “Let ’em,” said William, haughtily. “We’ve all done coolie-work since
  we came. I know Jack has.” This was to Hawkins’s address, and the big
  man smiled blandly.
  
  “Your brother’s a highly efficient officer, William,” said he, “and
  I’ve done him the honour of treating him as he deserves. Remember, I
  write the confidential reports.”
  
  “Then you must say that William’s worth her weight in gold,” said Mrs.
  Jim. “I don’t know what we should have done without her. She has been
  everything to us.” She dropped her hand upon William’s, which was rough
  with much handling of reins, and William patted it softly. Jim beamed
  on the company. Things were going well with his world. Three of his
  more grossly incompetent men had died, and their places had been filled
  by their betters. Every day brought the Rains nearer. They had put out
  the famine in five of the Eight Districts, and, after all, the
  death-rate had not been too heavy—things considered. He looked Scott
  over carefully, as an ogre looks over a man, and rejoiced in his thews
  and iron-hard condition.
  
  “He’s just the least bit in the world tucked up,” said Jim to himself,
  “but he can do two men’s work yet.” Then he was aware that Mrs. Jim was
  telegraphing to him, and according to the domestic code the message
  ran: “A clear case. Look at them!”
  
  He looked and listened. All that William was saying was: “What can you
  expect of a country where they call a _bhistee_ [a water-carrier] a
  _tunni-cutch?_” and all that Scott answered was: “I shall be glad to
  get back to the Club. Save me a dance at the Christmas Ball, won’t
  you?”
  
  “It’s a far cry from here to the Lawrence Hall,” said Jim. “Better turn
  in early, Scott. It’s paddy-carts to-morrow; you’ll begin loading at
  five.”
  
  “Aren’t you going to give Mr. Scott a single day’s rest?”
  
  “Wish I could, Lizzie, ’Fraid I can’t. As long as he can stand up we
  must use him.”
  
  “Well, I’ve had one Europe evening, at least. By Jove, I’d nearly
  forgotten! What do I do about those babies of mine?”
  
  “Leave them here,” said William—“we are in charge of that—and as many
  goats as you can spare. I must learn how to milk now.”
  
  “If you care to get up early enough to-morrow I’ll show you. I have to
  milk, you see. Half of ’em have beads and things round their necks. You
  must be careful not to take ’em off; in case the mothers turn up.”
  
  “You forget I’ve had some experience here.”
  
  “I hope to goodness you won’t overdo.” Scott’s voice was unguarded.
  
  “I’ll take care of her,” said Mrs. Jim, telegraphing hundred-word
  messages as she carried William off; while Jim gave Scott his orders
  for the coming campaign. It was very late—nearly nine o’clock.
  
  “Jim, you’re a brute,” said his wife, that night; and the Head of the
  Famine chuckled.
  
  “Not a bit of it, dear. I remember doing the first Jandiala Settlement
  for the sake of a girl in a crinoline, and she was slender, Lizzie.
  I’ve never done as good a piece of work since. _He_’ll work like a
  demon.”
  
  “But you might have given him one day.”
  
  “And let things come to a head now? No, dear; it’s their happiest
  time.”
  
  “I don’t believe either of the darlings know what’s the matter with
  them. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it lovely?”
  
  “Getting up at three to learn to milk, bless her heart! Oh, ye Gods,
  why must we grow old and fat?”
  
  “She’s a darling. She has done more work under me—”
  
  “Under _you!_ The day after she came she was in charge and you were her
  subordinate. You’ve stayed there ever since; she manages you almost as
  well as you manage me.”
  
  “She doesn’t, and that’s why I love her. She’s as direct as a man—as
  her brother.”
  
  “Her brother’s weaker than she is. He’s always to me for orders; but
  he’s honest, and a glutton for work. I confess I’m rather fond of
  William, and if I had a daughter—”
  
  The talk ended. Far away in the Derajat was a child’s grave more than
  twenty years old, and neither Jim nor his wife spoke of it any more.
  
  “All the same, you’re responsible,” Jim added, a moment’s silence.
  
  “Bless ’em!” said Mrs. Jim, sleepily.
  
  Before the stars paled, Scott, who slept in an empty cart, waked and
  went about his work in silence; it seemed at that hour unkind to rouse
  Faiz Ullah and the interpreter. His head being close to the ground, he
  did not hear William till she stood over him in the dingy old
  riding-habit, her eyes still heavy with sleep, a cup of tea and a piece
  of toast in her hands. There was a baby on the ground, squirming on a
  piece of blanket, and a six-year-old child peered over Scott’s
  shoulder.
  
  “Hai, you little rip,” said Scott, “how the deuce do you expect to get
  your rations if you aren’t quiet?”
  
  A cool white hand steadied the brat, who forthwith choked as the milk
  gurgled into his mouth.
  
  “Mornin’,” said the milker. “You’ve no notion how these little fellows
  can wriggle.”
  
  “Oh, yes, I have.” She whispered, because the world was asleep. “Only I
  feed them with a spoon or a rag. Yours are fatter than mine. And you’ve
  been doing this day after day?” The voice was almost lost.
  
  “Yes; it was absurd. Now you try,” he said, giving place to the girl.
  “Look out! A goat’s not a cow.”
  
  The goat protested against the amateur, and there was a scuffle, in
  which Scott snatched up the baby. Then it was all to do over again, and
  William laughed softly and merrily. She managed, however, to feed two
  babies, and a third.
  
  “Don’t the little beggars take it well?” said Scott. “I trained ’em.”
  
  They were very busy and interested, when lo! it was broad daylight, and
  before they knew, the camp was awake, and they kneeled among the goats,
  surprised by the day, both flushed to the temples. Yet all the round
  world rolling up out of the darkness might have heard and seen all that
  had passed between them.
  
  “Oh,” said William, unsteadily, snatching up the tea and toast, “I had
  this made for you. It’s stone-cold now. I thought you mightn’t have
  anything ready so early. Better not drink it. It’s—it’s stone-cold.”
  
  “That’s awfully kind of you. It’s just right. It’s awfully good of you,
  really. I’ll leave my kids and goats with you and Mrs. Jim, and, of
  course, any one in camp can show you about the milking.”
  
  “Of course,” said William; and she grew pinker and pinker and statelier
  and more stately, as she strode back to her tent, fanning herself with
  the saucer.
  
  There were shrill lamentations through the camp when the elder children
  saw their nurse move off without them. Faiz Ullah unbent so far as to
  jest with the policemen, and Scott turned purple with shame because
  Hawkins, already in the saddle, roared.
  
  A child escaped from the care of Mrs. Jim, and, running like a rabbit,
  clung to Scott’s boot, William pursuing with long, easy strides.
  
  “I will not go—I will not go!” shrieked the child, twining his feet
  round Scott’s ankle. “They will kill me here. I do not know these
  people.”
  
  “I say,” said Scott, in broken Tamil, “I say, she will do you no harm.
  Go with her and be well fed.”
  
  “Come!” said William, panting, with a wrathful glance at Scott, who
  stood helpless and, as it were, hamstrung.
  
  “Go back,” said Scott quickly to William. “I’ll send the little chap
  over in a minute.”
  
  The tone of authority had its effect, but in a way Scott did not
  exactly intend. The boy loosened his grasp, and said with gravity: “I
  did not know the woman was thine. I will go.” Then he cried to his
  companions, a mob of three-, four-, and five-year-olds waiting on the
  success of his venture ere they stampeded: “Go back and eat. It is our
  man’s woman. She will obey his orders.”
  
  Jim collapsed where he sat; Faiz Ullah and the two policemen grinned;
  and Scott’s orders to the cartmen flew like hail.
  
  “That is the custom of the Sahibs when truth is told in their
  presence,” said Faiz Ullah. “The time comes that I must seek new
  service. Young wives, especially such as speak our language and have
  knowledge of the ways of the Police, make great trouble for honest
  butlers in the matter of weekly accounts.”
  
  What William thought of it all she did not say, but when her brother,
  ten days later, came to camp for orders, and heard of Scott’s
  performances, he said, laughing: “Well, that settles it. He’ll be
  _Bakri_ Scott to the end of his days.” (_Bakri_ in the Northern
  vernacular, means a goat.) “What a lark! I’d have given a month’s pay
  to have seen him nursing famine babies. I fed some with _conjee_
  [rice-water], but that was all right.”
  
  “It’s perfectly disgusting,” said his sister, with blazing eyes. “A man
  does something like—like that—and all you other men think of is to give
  him an absurd nickname, and then you laugh and think it’s funny.”
  
  “Ah,” said Mrs. Jim, sympathetically.
  
  “Well, _you_ can’t talk, William. You christened little Miss Demby the
  Button-quail, last cold weather; you know you did. India’s the land of
  nicknames.”
  
  “That’s different,” William replied. “She was only a girl, and she
  hadn’t done anything except walk like a quail, and she _does_. But it
  isn’t fair to make fun of a man.”
  
  “Scott won’t care,” said Martyn. “You can’t get a rise out of old
  Scotty. I’ve been trying for eight years, and you’ve only known him for
  three. How does he look?”
  
  “He looks very well,” said William, and went away with a flushed cheek.
  “_Bakri_ Scott, indeed!” Then she laughed to herself, for she knew her
  country. “But it will be _Bakri_ all the same”; and she repeated it
  under her breath several times slowly, whispering it into favour.
  
  When he returned to his duties on the railway, Martyn spread the name
  far and wide among his associates, so that Scott met it as he led his
  paddy-carts to war. The natives believed it to be some English title of
  honour, and the cart-drivers used it in all simplicity till Faiz Ullah,
  who did not approve of foreign japes, broke their heads. There was very
  little time for milking now, except at the big camps, where Jim had
  extended Scott’s idea and was feeding large flocks on the useless
  northern grains. Sufficient paddy had come now into the Eight Districts
  to hold the people safe, if it were only distributed quickly, and for
  that purpose no one was better than the big Canal officer, who never
  lost his temper, never gave an unnecessary order, and never questioned
  an order given. Scott pressed on, saving his cattle, washing their
  galled necks daily, so that no time should be lost on the road;
  reported himself with his rice at the minor famine-sheds, unloaded, and
  went back light by forced night-march to the next distributing centre,
  to find Hawkins’s unvarying telegram: “Do it again.” And he did it
  again and again, and yet again, while Jim Hawkins, fifty miles away,
  marked off on a big map the tracks of his wheels gridironing the
  stricken lands. Others did well—Hawkins reported at the end they all
  did well—but Scott was the most excellent, for he kept good coined
  rupees by him, settled for his own cart-repairs on the spot, and ran to
  meet all sorts of unconsidered extras, trusting to be recouped later
  on. Theoretically, the Government should have paid for every shoe and
  linchpin, for every hand employed in the loading; but Government
  vouchers cash themselves slowly, and intelligent and efficient clerks
  write at great length, contesting unauthorised expenditures of eight
  annas. The man who wants to make his work a success must draw on his
  own bank-account of money or other things as he goes.
  
  “I told you he’d work,” said Jimmy to his wife, at the end of six
  weeks. “He’s been in sole charge of a couple of thousand men up north,
  on the Mosuhl Canal, for a year; but he gives less trouble than young
  Martyn with his ten constables; and I’m morally certain—only Government
  doesn’t recognise moral obligations—he’s spent about half his pay to
  grease his wheels. Look at this, Lizzie, for one week’s work! Forty
  miles in two days with twelve carts; two days’ halt building a
  famine-shed for young Rogers. (Rogers ought to have built it himself,
  the idiot!) Then forty miles back again, loading six carts on the way,
  and distributing all Sunday. Then in the evening he pitches in a
  twenty-page Demi-Official to me, saying the people where he is might be
  ‘advantageously employed on relief-work,’ and suggesting that he put
  ’em to work on some broken-down old reservoir he’s discovered, so as to
  have a good water-supply when the Rains break. He thinks he can cauk
  the dam in a fortnight. Look at his marginal sketches—aren’t they clear
  and good? I knew he was _pukka_, but I didn’t know he was as _pukka_ as
  this!”
  
  “I must show these to William,” said Mrs. Jim. “The child’s wearing
  herself out among the babies.”
  
  “Not more than you are, dear. Well, another two months ought to see us
  out of the wood. I’m sorry it’s not in my power to recommend you for a
  V. C.”
  
  William sat late in her tent that night, reading through page after
  page of the square handwriting, patting the sketches of proposed
  repairs to the reservoir, and wrinkling her eyebrows over the columns
  of figures of estimated water-supply. “And he finds time to do all
  this,” she cried to herself, “and—well, I also was present. I’ve saved
  one or two babies.”
  
  She dreamed for the twentieth time of the god in the golden dust, and
  woke refreshed to feed loathsome black children, scores of them,
  wastrels picked up by the wayside, their bones almost breaking their
  skin, terrible and covered with sores.
  
  Scott was not allowed to leave his cart-work, but his letter was duly
  forwarded to the Government, and he had the consolation, not rare in
  India, of knowing that another man was reaping where he had sown. That
  also was discipline profitable to the soul.
  
  “He’s much too good to waste on canals,” said Jimmy. “Any one can
  oversee coolies. You needn’t be angry, William; he can—but I need my
  pearl among bullock-drivers, and I’ve transferred him to the Khanda
  district, where he’ll have it all to do over again. He should be
  marching now.
  
  “He’s _not_ a coolie,” said William, furiously. “He ought to be doing
  his regulation work.”
  
  “He’s the best man in his service, and that’s saying a good deal; but
  if you _must_ use razors to cut grindstones, why, I prefer the best
  cutlery.”
  
  “Isn’t it almost time we saw him again?” said Mrs. Jim. “I’m sure the
  poor boy hasn’t had a respectable meal for a month. He probably sits on
  a cart and eats sardines with his fingers.”
  
  “All in good time, dear. Duty before decency—wasn’t it Mr. Chucks said
  that?”
  
  “No; it was Midshipman Easy,” William laughed. “I sometimes wonder how
  it will feel to dance or listen to a band again, or sit under a roof. I
  can’t believe I ever wore a ball-frock in my life.”
  
  “One minute,” said Mrs. Jim, who was thinking. “If he goes to Khanda,
  he passes within five miles of us. Of course he’ll ride in.”
  
  “Oh, no, he won’t,” said William.
  
  “How do you know, dear?”
  
  “It will take him off his work. He won’t have time.”
  
  “He’ll make it,” said Mrs. Jim, with a twinkle.
  
  “It depends on his own judgment. There’s absolutely no reason why he
  shouldn’t, if he thinks fit,” said Jim.
  
  “He won’t see fit,” William replied, without sorrow or emotion. “It
  wouldn’t be him if he did.”
  
  “One certainly gets to know people rather well in times like these,”
  said Jim, drily; but William’s face was serene as ever, and even as she
  prophesied, Scott did not appear.
  
  The Rains fell at last, late, but heavily; and the dry, gashed earth
  was red mud, and servants killed snakes in the camp, where every one
  was weather-bound for a fortnight—all except Hawkins, who took horse
  and plashed about in the wet, rejoicing. Now the Government decreed
  that seed-grain should be distributed to the people, as well as
  advances of money for the purchase of new oxen; and the white men were
  doubly worked for this new duty, while William skipped from brick to
  brick laid down on the trampled mud, and dosed her charges with warming
  medicines that made them rub their little round stomachs; and the milch
  goats throve on the rank grass. There was never a word from Scott in
  the Khanda district, away to the southeast, except the regular
  telegraphic report to Hawkins. The rude country roads had disappeared;
  his drivers were half mutinous; one of Martyn’s loaned policemen had
  died of cholera; and Scott was taking thirty grains of quinine a day to
  fight the fever that comes with the rain: but those were things Scott
  did not consider necessary to report. He was, as usual, working from a
  base of supplies on a railway line, to cover a circle of fifteen miles
  radius, and since full loads were impossible, he took quarter-loads,
  and toiled four times as hard by consequence; for he did not choose to
  risk an epidemic which might have grown uncontrollable by assembling
  villagers in thousands at the relief-sheds. It was cheaper to take
  Government bullocks, work them to death, and leave them to the crows in
  the wayside sloughs.
  
  That was the time when eight years of clean living and hard condition
  told, though a man’s head were ringing like a bell from the cinchona,
  and the earth swayed under his feet when he stood and under his bed
  when he slept. If Hawkins had seen fit to make him a bullock-driver,
  that, he thought, was entirely Hawkins’s own affair. There were men in
  the North who would know what he had done; men of thirty years’ service
  in his own department who would say that it was “not half bad”; and
  above, immeasurably above, all men of all grades, there was William in
  the thick of the fight, who would approve because she understood. He
  had so trained his mind that it would hold fast to the mechanical
  routine of the day, though his own voice sounded strange in his own
  ears, and his hands, when he wrote, grew large as pillows or small as
  peas at the end of his wrists. That steadfastness bore his body to the
  telegraph-office at the railway-station, and dictated a telegram to
  Hawkins saying that the Khanda district was, in his judgment, now safe,
  and he “waited further orders.”
  
  The Madrassee telegraph-clerk did not approve of a large, gaunt man
  falling over him in a dead faint, not so much because of the weight as
  because of the names and blows that Faiz Ullah dealt him when he found
  the body rolled under a bench. Then Faiz Ullah took blankets, quilts,
  and coverlets where he found them, and lay down under them at his
  master’s side, and bound his arms with a tent-rope, and filled him with
  a horrible stew of herbs, and set the policeman to fight him when he
  wished to escape from the intolerable heat of his coverings, and shut
  the door of the telegraph-office to keep out the curious for two nights
  and one day; and when a light engine came down the line, and Hawkins
  kicked in the door, Scott hailed him weakly but in a natural voice, and
  Faiz Ullah stood back and took all the credit.
  
  “For two nights, Heaven-born, he was _pagal_” said Faiz Ullah. “Look at
  my nose, and consider the eye of the policeman. He beat us with his
  bound hands; but we sat upon him, Heaven-born, and though his words
  were _tez_, we sweated him. Heaven-born, never has been such a sweat!
  He is weaker now than a child; but the fever has gone out of him, by
  the grace of God. There remains only my nose and the eye of the
  constabeel. Sahib, shall I ask for my dismissal because my Sahib has
  beaten me?” And Faiz Ullah laid his long thin hand carefully on Scott’s
  chest to be sure that the fever was all gone, ere he went out to open
  tinned soups and discourage such as laughed at his swelled nose.
  
  “The district’s all right,” Scott whispered. “It doesn’t make any
  difference. You got my wire? I shall be fit in a week. ’Can’t
  understand how it happened. I shall be fit in a few days.”
  
  “You’re coming into camp with us,” said Hawkins.
  
  “But look here—but—”
  
  “It’s all over except the shouting. We sha’n’t need you Punjabis any
  more. On my honour, we sha’n’t. Martyn goes back in a few weeks;
  Arbuthnot’s returned already; Ellis and Clay are putting the last
  touches to a new feeder-line the Government’s built as relief-work.
  Morten’s dead—he was a Bengal man, though; you wouldn’t know him. ’Pon
  my word, you and Will—Miss Martyn—seem to have come through it as well
  as anybody.”
  
  “Oh, how is she, by-the-way?” The voice went up and down as he spoke.
  
  “Going strong when I left her. The Roman Catholic Missions are adopting
  the unclaimed babies to turn them into little priests; the Basil
  Mission is taking some, and the mothers are taking the rest. You should
  hear the little beggars howl when they’re sent away from William. She’s
  pulled down a bit, but so are we all. Now, when do you suppose you’ll
  be able to move?”
  
  “I can’t come into camp in this state. I won’t,” he replied pettishly.
  
  “Well, you _are_ rather a sight, but from what I gathered there it
  seemed to me they’d be glad to see you under any conditions. I’ll look
  over your work here, if you like, for a couple of days, and you can
  pull yourself together while Faiz Ullah feeds you up.”
  
  Scott could walk dizzily by the time Hawkins’s inspection was ended,
  and he flushed all over when Jim said of his work that it was “not half
  bad,” and volunteered, further, that he had considered Scott his
  right-hand man through the famine, and would feel it his duty to say as
  much officially.
  
  So they came back by rail to the old camp; but there were no crowds
  near it; the long fires in the trenches were dead and black, and the
  famine-sheds were almost empty.
  
  “You see!” said Jim. “There isn’t much more to do. Better ride up and
  see the wife. They’ve pitched a tent for you. Dinner’s at seven. I’ve
  some work here.”
  
  Riding at a foot-pace, Faiz Ullah by his stirrup, Scott came to William
  in the brown-calico riding-habit, sitting at the dining-tent door, her
  hands in her lap, white as ashes, thin and worn, with no lustre in her
  hair. There did not seem to be any Mrs. Jim on the horizon, and all
  that William could say was: “My word, how pulled down you look!”
  
  “I’ve had a touch of fever. You don’t look very well yourself.”
  
  “Oh, I’m fit enough. We’ve stamped it out. I suppose you know?”
  
  Scott nodded. “We shall all be returned in a few weeks. Hawkins told
  me.”
  
  “Before Christmas, Mrs. Jim says. Sha’n’t you be glad to go back? I can
  smell the wood-smoke already”; William sniffed. “We shall be in time
  for all the Christmas doings. I don’t suppose even the Punjab
  Government would be base enough to transfer Jack till the new year?”
  
  “It seems hundreds of years ago—the Punjab and all that—doesn’t it? Are
  you glad you came?”
  
  “Now it’s all over, yes. It has been ghastly here, though. You know we
  had to sit still and do nothing, and Sir Jim was away so much.”
  
  “Do nothing! How did you get on with the milking?”
  
  “I managed it somehow—after you taught me.”
  
  Then the talk stopped with an almost audible jar. Still no Mrs. Jim.
  
  “That reminds me, I owe you fifty rupees for the condensed-milk. I
  thought perhaps you’d be coming here when you were transferred to the
  Khanda district, and I could pay you then; but you didn’t.”
  
  “I passed within five miles of the camp, but it was in the middle of a
  march, you see, and the carts were breaking down every few minutes, and
  I couldn’t get ’em over the ground till ten o’clock that night. I
  wanted to come awfully. You knew I did, didn’t you?”
  
  “I—believe—I—did,” said William, facing him with level eyes. She was no
  longer white.
  
  “Did you understand?”
  
  “Why you didn’t ride in? Of course I did.”
  
  “Why?”
  
  “Because you couldn’t, of course. I knew that.”
  
  “Did you care?”
  
  “If you had come in—but I knew you wouldn’t—but if you _had_, I should
  have cared a great deal. You know I should.”
  
  “Thank God I didn’t! Oh, but I wanted to! I couldn’t trust myself to
  ride in front of the carts, because I kept edging ’em over here, don’t
  you know?”
  
  “I knew you wouldn’t,” said William, contentedly. “Here’s your fifty.”
  
  Scott bent forward and kissed the hand that held the greasy notes. Its
  fellow patted him awkwardly but very tenderly on the head.
  
  “And _you_ knew, too, didn’t you?” said William, in a new voice.
  
  “No, on my honour, I didn’t. I hadn’t the—the cheek to expect anything
  of the kind, except... I say, were you out riding anywhere the day I
  passed by to Khanda?”
  
  William nodded, and smiled after the manner of an angel surprised in a
  good deed.
  
  “Then it was just a speck I saw of your habit in the—”
  
  “Palm-grove on the Southern cart-road. I saw your helmet when you came
  up from the mullah by the temple—just enough to be sure that you were
  all right. D’ you care?”
  
  This time Scott did not kiss her hand, for they were in the dusk of the
  dining-tent, and, because William’s knees were trembling under her, she
  had to sit down in the nearest chair, where she wept long and happily,
  her head on her arms; and when Scott imagined that it would be well to
  comfort her, she needing nothing of the kind, she ran to her own tent;
  and Scott went out into the world, and smiled upon it largely and
  idiotically. But when Faiz Ullah brought him a drink, he found it
  necessary to support one hand with the other, or the good whisky and
  soda would have been spilled abroad. There are fevers and fevers.
  
  But it was worse—much worse—the strained, eye-shirking talk at dinner
  till the servants had withdrawn, and worst of all when Mrs. Jim, who
  had been on the edge of weeping from the soup down, kissed Scott and
  William, and they drank one whole bottle of champagne, hot, because
  there was no ice, and Scott and William sat outside the tent in the
  starlight till Mrs. Jim drove them in for fear of more fever.
  
  Apropos of these things and some others William said: “Being engaged is
  abominable, because, you see, one has no official position. We must be
  thankful we’ve lots of things to do.”
  
  “Things to do!” said Jim, when that was reported to him. “They’re
  neither of them any good any more. I can’t get five hours’ work a day
  out of Scott. He’s in the clouds half the time.”
  
  “Oh, but they’re so beautiful to watch, Jimmy. It will break my heart
  when they go. Can’t you do anything for him?”
  
  “I’ve given the Government the impression—at least, I hope I have—that
  he personally conducted the entire famine. But all he wants is to get
  on to the Luni Canal Works, and William’s just as bad. Have you ever
  heard ’em talking of barrage and aprons and wastewater? It’s their
  style of spooning, I suppose.”
  
  Mrs. Jim smiled tenderly. “Ah, that’s in the intervals—bless ’em.”
  
  And so Love ran about the camp unrebuked in broad daylight, while men
  picked up the pieces and put them neatly away of the Famine in the
  Eight Districts.
  
  Morning brought the penetrating chill of the Northern December, the
  layers of wood-smoke, the dusty grey-blue of the tamarisks, the domes
  of ruined tombs, and all the smell of the white Northern plains, as the
  mail-train ran on to the mile-long Sutlej Bridge. William, wrapped in a
  _poshteen_—a silk-embroidered sheepskin jacket trimmed with rough
  astrakhan—looked out with moist eyes and nostrils that dilated
  joyously. The South of pagodas and palm-trees, the overpopulated Hindu
  South, was done with. Here was the land she knew and loved, and before
  her lay the good life she understood, among folk of her own caste and
  mind.
  
  They were picking them up at almost every station now—men and women
  coming in for the Christmas Week, with racquets, with bundles of
  polo-sticks, with dear and bruised cricket-bats, with fox-terriers and
  saddles. The greater part of them wore jackets like William’s, for the
  Northern cold is as little to be trifled with as the Northern heat. And
  William was among them and of them, her hands deep in her pockets, her
  collar turned up over her ears, stamping her feet on the platforms as
  she walked up and down to get warm, visiting from carriage to carriage
  and everywhere being congratulated. Scott was with the bachelors at the
  far end of the train, where they chaffed him mercilessly about feeding
  babies and milking goats; but from time to time he would stroll up to
  William’s window, and murmur: “Good enough, isn’t it?” and William
  would answer with sighs of pure delight: “Good enough, indeed.” The
  large open names of the home towns were good to listen to. Umballa,
  Ludianah, Phillour, Jullundur, they rang like the coming marriage-bells
  in her ears, and William felt deeply and truly sorry for all strangers
  and outsiders—visitors, tourists, and those fresh-caught for the
  service of the country.
  
  It was a glorious return, and when the bachelors gave the Christmas
  Ball, William was, unofficially, you might say, the chief and honoured
  guest among the Stewards, who could make things very pleasant for their
  friends. She and Scott danced nearly all the dances together, and sat
  out the rest in the big dark gallery overlooking the superb teak floor,
  where the uniforms blazed, and the spurs clinked, and the new frocks
  and four hundred dancers went round and round till the draped flags on
  the pillars flapped and bellied to the whirl of it.
  
  About midnight half a dozen men who did not care for dancing came over
  from the Club to play “Waits,” and that was a surprise the Stewards had
  arranged—before any one knew what had happened, the band stopped, and
  hidden voices broke into “Good King Wenceslaus,” and William in the
  gallery hummed and beat time with her foot:
  
  “Mark my footsteps well, my page,
      Tread thou in them boldly.
  Thou shalt feel the winter’s rage
      Freeze thy blood less coldly!”
  
  
  “Oh, I hope they are going to give us another! Isn’t it pretty, coming
  out of the dark in that way? Look—look down. There’s Mrs. Gregory
  wiping her eyes!”
  
  “It’s like Home, rather,” said Scott. “I remember—”
  
  “Hsh! Listen!—dear.” And it began again:
  
  “When shepherds watched their flocks by night—”
  
  
  “A-h-h!” said William, drawing closer to Scott.
  
  All seated on the ground,
  The Angel of the Lord came down,
  And glory shone around.
  ‘Fear not,’ said he (for mighty dread
  Had seized their troubled mind);
  ‘Glad tidings of great joy I bring
  To you and all mankind.’
  
  
  This time it was William that wiped her eyes.