Chapter II: The Boy (2)

Rising silently, Moussa drew his dagger of glass from beneath his only garment, aimed at the patch of light upon the fat neck, and struck. Sulemani lurched, collapsed, and fell between the lighter and the ship without an audible sound in that dim pandemonium.

Even as the "dagger" touched flesh, the light was quenched, Mrs. Pat Dearman having realized that the stuffy, hot cabin was positively uninhabitable until the port-hole could be opened, after coaling operations were completed.

Moussa Isa reseated himself, grabbed the rope again, and with clear conscience, duty done, calmly awaited that which might follow.

Nothing followed. None had seen the deed, consummated in unrelieved gloom; the light had failed most timely....

The next person who mortally affronted Moussa Isa, committing the unpardonable sin, was a grievously fat, foolish Indian Mohammedan youth whose father supported four wives, five sons, six daughters and himself in idleness and an Aden shop.

It was a remarkably idle and unobtrusive shop and yet money flowed into it without stint, mysteriously and unostentatiously, the conduits of its flow being certain modest and retiring Arab visitors in long brown or white _haiks_, with check cotton head-dresses girt with ropes of camel-hair, who collogued with the honest tradesman and departed as silently and unobtrusively as they came....

One of them, strangely enough, ejaculated "_Himmel_" and "_Donnerwetter_" as often as "_Bismillah_" and "_Inshallah_" when he swore.

The very fat son of this secretive house in an evil hour one inauspicious evening took it upon him to revile and abuse his father's servant, one Moussa Isa, an African boy, as he performed divers domestic duties in the exiguous "compound" of the dwelling-place and refused to do the fat youth's behest ere completing them.

"Haste thee at once to the bazaar, thou dog," screamed the fat youth.

"Later on," replied Moussa Isa, using the words that express the general attitude of the East.

"Now, dog. Now, Hubshi, or I will beat thee."

"I will kill _you_," replied Moussa Isa, and again bided his time.

"Hubshi, Hubshi, Hubshi," goaded the misguided fat one.

His Kismet led the youth, some weeks later, to lay him down and sleep in the shade of the house upon some broad flagstones. Here Moussa found him and regretted the loss of his glass-dagger,--last seen in the neck of a foreman of coal-coolies toppling into the dark void between a barge and a ship,--but remembered a big heavy stone used to facilitate the scaling of the compound wall.

Staggering with it to the spot where the fat youth lay slumbering peacefully, Moussa Isa, in the sight of all men (who happened to be looking), dashed it upon his fez-adorned head, and established the hitherto disputable fact that the fat youth had brains.

To the Magistrate, Moussa Isa offered neither excuse nor prayer. Explanation he vouchsafed in the words:--

"He called _me_, Moussa Isa of the Somali, a _Hubshi!_"

Being of tender years and of insignificant stature he was condemned to flogging and seven years in a Reformatory School. He was too juvenile for the Aden Jail. The Reformatory School nearest to Aden is at Duri in India, and thither, in spite of earnest prayers that he might go to hard labour in Aden Jail like a man and a Somali, was Moussa Isa duly transported and therein incarcerated.

At the Duri Reformatory School, Moussa Isa was profoundly miserable, most unhappy, and deeply depressed by a sense of the very cruellest injustice.

For here they simply did not know the difference between a Somal and a woolly-haired dog of a negro. They honestly did not know that there was a difference. To them, a clicking Bushman was as a Nubian, an earth-eating Kattia as a Kabyle, a face-cicatrized, tooth-sharpened cannibal of the Aruwimi as a Danakil,--a _Hubshi_ as a Somal. They simply did not know. To them all Africans were _Hubshis_ (just as to an English M.P. all the three or four hundred millions of Indians are Bengali babus). They meant no insult; they knew no better. All Africans were black niggers and every soul in the place, from Brahmin to Untouchable, looked down upon the African, the Black Man, the Nigger, the Cannibal, the _Hubshi_, sent from Africa to defile their Reformatory and destroy their caste.

Here, the proud self-respecting Moussa, jealous champion of the honour of his, to him, high and noble race, found himself a god-send to the Out-castes, the Untouchables, the Depressed Classes, Mangs, Mahars, and Sudras,--they whose touch, nay the touch of whose very shadow, is defilement! For, at last, they, too, had some one to look down upon, to despise, to insult. After being the recipients-of-contempt as naturally and ordainedly as they were breathers-of-air, they at last could apply a salve, and pass on to another the utter contempt and loathing which they themselves received and accepted from the Brahmins and all those of Caste. They had found one lower than themselves. _Moussa Isa of the Somali_ was the out-cast of out-casts, the pariah of pariahs, prohibited from touching the untouchables, one of a class depressed below the depressed classes--in short a _Hubshi!_

Even a broad-nosed, foreheadless, blubber--lipped aborigine from the hill-jungles objected to his presence!

In the small, self-contained, self-supporting world of the Reformatory, it was Moussa Isa against the World. And against the World he stood up.

It had to learn the difference between a Somali and a _Hubshi_ at any cost--the cost of Moussa's life included.

What added to the sorrow of the situation was the realization of how charming and desirable a retreat the place was in itself,--apart from its ignorant and stupid inhabitants.

Expecting a kind of torture-house wherein he would be starved, sweated, thrashed by brutal _kourbash_-wielding overseers, he found the most palatial and comfortable of clubs, a place of perfect peace, safety, and ease, where one was kindly treated by those in authority, sumptuously fed, luxuriously lodged, and provided with pleasant occupation, attractive amusements and reasonable leisure.

He had always heard and believed that the English were mad, and now he knew it.

As a punishment for murder he had got a birching that merely tickled him, and a free ticket to seven years' board, lodging, clothing, lighting, medical care, instruction and diversion!

_Wow_!

Were it not for the presence of the insolent, ignorant, untravelled, inexperienced, soft-living, lily-livered dogs of inhabitants, the place was the Earthly Paradise. They were the crocodile in the ointment.

A young Brahmin, son of a well-paid Government servant, and incarcerated for forgery and theft, was his most annoying persecutor. He was at great pains to expectorate and murmur "_Hubshi_" in accents of abhorrent contempt, whenever Moussa Isa chanced between the wind and his nobility.

The first time, Moussa replied with pitying magnanimity and all reasonableness:--

"I am not a _Hubshi_, but a Somali, which is quite different--even as a lion is different from a jackal or a man from an ape".

To which the Brahmin replied but:--

"_Hubshi_," and pointed out that there was danger of Moussa Isa's shadow touching him, if Moussa were not careful.

"I must kill you if you call me _Hubshi_, understanding that I am of the Somals," said Moussa Isa.

"_Hubshi_," would the Brahmin reply and loudly bewail his evil Luck which had put him in the power of the accursed Feringhi Government--a Government that compelled a Brahmin to breathe the same air as a filthy negro dog, a Woolly One of Africa, barely human and most untouchable, a living Contamination ... and Moussa cast about for a weapon.

His first opportunity arose when he found the Brahmin, who was in the book-binding and compositor department, working one day in the same gardening-gang with himself.

He had but a watering-can by way of offensive weapon, but good play can be made with a big iron watering-can wielded in the right spirit and the right hand.

Master Brahmin was feebly tapping the earth with a kind of single-headed pick, and watching him, Moussa Isa saw that, in a quarter of an hour or so, he might plausibly and legitimately pass within a yard or two of this his enemy, as he went to and fro between the water-tap and the strip of flower-border that he was sprinkling.... Would they hang him if he killed the Brahmin, or would they feebly flog him again and give him a longer sentence (that he be supported, fed, lodged, clothed and cared for) than the present seven years?

There was no foretelling what the mad English would do. Sometimes they acquitted a criminal and gave him money and education, and sometimes they sent him to far distant islands in the South and there housed and fed him free, for life; and sometimes they killed him at the end of a rope.

Doubtless Allah smote the English mad to prevent them from stealing the whole world.... If they were not mad they would do so and enslave all other races--except their conquerors, the Dervishes, of course.... It was like the lying hypocrites to call the Great Mullah "the Mad Mullah" knowing themselves to be mad, and being afraid of their victorious enemy who had driven them out of Somaliland to the coast forts....

Oh, if they would only treat him, Moussa Isa, as an adult, and send him to the Aden Jail to hard labour. There folk knew a Somali from a _Hubshi_; a gentleman of Afar and Galla stock, of Arab blood, Moslem tenets, and Caucasian descent, from a common nigger, a low black Ethiopian, an eater of men and insects, a worshipper of idols and _ju-ju_.

In Aden, men knew a Somali from a _Hubshi_ as surely as they knew an Emir from a mere Englishman.

Here, in benighted, ignorant, savage India, the Dark Continent indeed, men knew not what a Somali was, likened him to a Negro, ranked him lower than a Hindu even--called him a _Hubshi_ in insolent ignorance. If only the beautiful Reformatory were in Berbera, and tenanted by Africans.

Better Aden Jail a thousand times than Duri Reformatory.

What a splendid joke if the dog of a Brahmin who persistently insulted him--even after he had been shown his error and ignorance--should be the unwitting means of his return to Aden--where a Somali gentleman is recognized. There is no harm about a Jail as such. Far from it. A jail is a wise man's paradise provided by fools. You have excellent and plentiful food, a roof against the sun, unfailing water supply, clothing, interesting occupation, and safety--protection from your enemies. No man harries you, you are not chained, you are not tortured; you have all that heart can desire. Freedom?... What _is_ Freedom? Freedom to die of thirst in the desert? Freedom to be disembowelled by the Great Mullah? Freedom to be sold as a slave into Arabia or Persia? Freedom to be the unfed, unpaid, well-beaten property of gun-runners in the Gulf, or of Arab _safari_ ruffians and "black-ivory" men? Freedom to be left to the hyaena when you broke down on the march? Freedom to die of starvation when you fell sick and could not carry coal? Thanks.

If the mad English provided beautiful refuges, and made the commission of certain crimes the requisite qualification for admission, let wise men qualify.

Take this Reformatory--where else could a little Somali boy get such safety, peace, food, and sumptuous luxury; everything the heart could desire, in return for doing a little gardening? Even a house to himself as though he were the honoured, favourite son of some chief.

To Moussa Isa, the dark and dingy cell with its bare stone walls, mud floor, grated aperture and iron door was a fine safe house; its iron bed-frame with cotton-rug-covered laths and stony pillow, a piece of wanton luxury; its shelf, stool and utensils, prideful wealth. If only the place were in Africa or Aden! Well, Aden Jail would do, and if the Brahmin's death led to his being sent there as a serious and respectable murderer, it would be a real case of two enemies on one spear--an insult avenged and a most desired re-patriation achieved.

That would be subtilty,--at once washing out the insult in the Brahmin's blood and getting sent whither his heart turned so constantly and fondly. They had treated him as a juvenile offender because he was so small and young, and because the killing of the fat Mussulman was his first offence, as they supposed. Surely they would recognize that he was a man when he had killed his second enemy--especially if he told them about Sulemani. What in the name of Allah did they want, to constitute a real sound criminal, fit for Aden Jail, if three murders were not enough? Well, he would go on killing until they did have enough, and were obliged to send him to Aden Jail. There he would behave beautifully and kill nobody until they wanted to turn him out to starve. Then, since murder was the requisite qualification, he would murder to admiration. He knew they could not send him over the way to the Duri Jail, since he belonged to Aden, had been convicted there, and only sent to the Duri Reformatory because Aden boasted no such institution....

Yes. The Brahmin's corpse should be the stepping-stone to higher things and the place where people knew a Somali from a Negro.

If only he were in the carpentry department with Master Brahmin, where there were axes, hammers, chisels, knives, saws, and various pointed instruments. Fancy teaching the young gentleman manners and ethnology with an axe! However, after one or two more journeys between the tap and the flower-bed, he would pass within striking-distance of the dog as he worked his slow way along the tract of earth he was supposed to be digging up with the silly short-handled pick.

Should he try and seize the pick and give him one on the temple with it? No, the Brahmin would scream and struggle and the overseer would be on Moussa Isa in a single bound. He must strike a sudden blow in the act of passing.

A few more journeys to the water-tap....

_Now!_ "_Hubshi_," eh?

Halting beside the crouching Brahmin youth, Moussa Isa swung up the heavy watering-can by the spout and aimed a blow with all his strength at the side of his enemy's head. He designed to bring the sharp strong rim of the base behind the ear with the first blow, on the temple with the second, and just anywhere thereafter, if time permitted of a thereafter.

But the aggravating creature tossed his head as Moussa, with a grunt of energy, brought the vessel down, and the rim merely struck the top of the shaven skull. Another--harder. Another--with frenzied strength and the force of long-suppressed rage and sense of wrong.

And then Moussa was knocked head over heels and sat upon by the overseer in charge of the garden-gang, while the Brahmin twitched convulsively on the ground. He was by no means dead, however, and the sole immediate results, to Moussa, were penal diet, solitary confinement in his palatial cell, a severe sentence of corn-grinding with the heavy quern, and most joyous recollections of the sound of the water-can on the pate of the foe.

"I have still to kill you, of course," he whispered to his victim, the next time they met, and the Brahmin went in terror of his life. He was a very clever young person and had passed an astounding number of examinations in the course of his brief career. But he was not courageous, and his "education" had given him skill in nothing practical, except in penmanship, which skill he had devoted to forgery.

"Why did you violently commit this dastardish deed, and assault the harmless peaceful Brahmin?" asked the Superintendent, a worthy and voluble babu, and then translated the question into debased Hindustani.

"He called me _Hubshi_, and I will kill him," replied Moussa.

"Oho! and you kill everyone who calls you _Hubshi_, do you, Master African?"

"I do. I wish to go to Aden Jail for attempting murder. It will be murder if I am kept here where none knows a man from a dog."

"Oho! And you would kill even _me_, I suppose, if I called you _Hubshi_."

"Of course! I will kill you in any case if I am not sent to Aden Jail."

The babu decided that it was high time for some other institution to shelter this touchy and truculent person, and that he would lay the case before the next weekly Visitor and ask for it to be submitted to the Committee at their ensuing monthly meeting.

The Visitor of the week happened to be the Educational Inspector. "Wants to leave India, does he?" said the Inspector, looking Moussa over as he heard the statement of the Superintendent. "I admire his taste. India is a magnificent country to leave."

The Educational Inspector, a very keen, thoughtful and competent educationist, was a disappointed man, like so many of his Service. He felt that he had, for quarter of a century, strenuously woven ropes of sand. When his liver was particularly sluggish he felt that for quarter of a century he had worked industriously, not at a useless thing, but at an evil thing--a terrible belief.

Moreover, after quarter of a century of faithful labour and strict economy, he found himself with a load of debt, broken health, and a cheaply educated family of boys and girls to whom he was a complete stranger--merely the man who found the money and sent it Home, visiting them from time to time at intervals of four or five years. India had killed his wife, and broken him.

He had had what seemed to him to be bitter experience also. An individual, notoriously slack and incompetent, ten years his junior, had been promoted over his head, because he was somebody's cousin and the kind of fatuous ass that only labours industriously in drawing-rooms and at functions, recuperating by slacking idly in offices and at duties--a paltry but paying game much practised by a very small class in India.

Another individual, by reason of his having come to India two boats earlier than the Inspector, drew Rs. 500 a month more than he did, this being the Senior Inspector's Allowance. That he was reported on as lazy, eccentric, and irregular, made no difference to the fact that he was a fortnight senior to, and therefore worth Rs. 500 a month more than, the next man. The recipient regarded the extra trifle (£400 a year) as his bare right and merest due. The Inspector regarded it as an infamous piece of injustice and folly that for fifteen years the whole of this sum should go to a lazy fool because he happened to set sail from England on a certain date, and not a fortnight later. So he loathed and detested India where he had had bad luck, bad health and what he considered bad treatment, and sympathized with the desire of Moussa Isa.

"Why do you want to go back to Aden?" he inquired in the _lingua franca_ of the Indian Empire, of Moussa whose heart beat high with hope.

"Because here, where there are no lions, wolves think a lion is a dog; here where there are no men, asses think a man is a monkey. I am a Somal, and these ignorant camels think I am a negro--a filthy Hubshi."

"And you tried to kill another boy because he called you 'Hubshi,' eh?"

"I did, Sahib, and I will kill him yet if I be not sent to Aden. If that fail I will kill myself also."

"Stout fella," commented the Inspector in his own vernacular, and added, musing aloud:--

"You'll come to the gallows through possessing pride, self-respect and determination, my lad. You're behind the times--or rather you maintain a spirit for which Civilization has no use. You must return to the Wilds of the Earth or else you must be content to become good, grubby, and grey, dull and dejected, sober and sorrowful, respectable and unenterprising--like me; and you must cultivate fat, propriety, smugness and the Dead Level.... What, you young Devil! You'd have self-respect and pride, would you; be quick upon the point of honour, eh? revive the duello, what? Get thee to a--er--less civilized and respectable age or place ... in other words, Mr. Toshiwalla, bring the case before the Committee of Visitors. I'll put up a note to the effect that he had better be sent back to Aden. This is a Reformatory, and there's nothing very reformatory about keeping him to plan murder and suicide because he has been (quite unjustifiably) transported as well as flogged and imprisoned. Yes, we'll consider the case. Meanwhile, keep a sharp eye on him--and give him all the corn-grinding he can do. Sweat the Original Sin out of him ... and see he does not secrete any kind of weapon."

Accordingly was Moussa segregated, and to the base women's-work of corn-grinding in the cook-house, wholly relegated. It was hard, soul-breaking work, ignoble and degrading, but he drew two crumbs of comfort from the bread of affliction. He was developing his arm-muscles and he was literally watering the said bread of affliction with the sweat of labour. As the heavy drops trickled from chin and nose into the meal around the grindstone, it pleased Moussa Isa to reflect that his enemy should eat of it. Since the shadow of Moussa was pollution to these travesties of men and warriors, let them have a little concrete pollution also. But in the cook-house, while arm and soul wearied together, one heavy day of copper sky and brazen earth, first eye and then foot, fell upon a piece of tin, the lid of some empty milk-tin or like vessel. The prehensile toes gathered in the trove, the foot gently rose and the fingers of the pendant left hand secured the disc, while the body swayed with the strenuous circlings of the right hand chat revolved the heavy upper millstone.

That night, immediately after being locked in his cell, that there might be the fullest time for bleeding to death, he slashed and slashed while strength lasted at wrist and abdomen--but without succeeding in penetrating the abdominal wall and reaching the viscera.

This effected his transfer to the Reformatory hospital and underlined the remark of the Inspector in the Visitors' Book to the effect that one Moussa Isa would commit suicide or murder, if kept at Duri, and would certainly not be "reformed" in any way. In hospital, Major Jackson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, a Visitor of the Duri Jail, paying his periodical visits, grew interested in the sturdy bright boy and soon came to like him for his directness, cheery courage, and refreshing views. When the boy was convalescent he took him on the surrounding Duri golf-links as his caddie in his endless games with his poor friend Sergeant-Major Lawrence-Smith, _ex_-gentleman.

Moussa was grateful and, fingering the scar on his throat, likened Major Jackson to his hero, the fair Sheikh who had saved him from the lion and had lost his life through intervening on Moussa's behalf in the boat. But _he_ was not mad like these English. He would not, with infinite earnestness, seriousness and mingled joy at success and grief at failure, have pursued a little white ball with a stick, mile after mile, knocking it with infinite precautions, every now and then, into a little hole, and taking it out again.

No, _his_ idea of sport across country with an iron-shod stick would rather have been lion-hunting with an assegai (yet, curiously enough, one, Robin Ross-Ellison, lived to play more than one game of golf with Major Jackson on these same Duri Links). To see this adult white man behaving so, _coram publico_, made Moussa bitterly ashamed for him.

And, as the sun set, Moussa Isa earned a sharp rebuke for inattentive slacking, as he stood sighing his soul to where it sank in the West over Aden and Somaliland.... Wait till his chance of escape arrived; he would journey straight for the sunset, day after day, until he reached a sea-shore. There he would steal a canoe and paddle and paddle straight for the sunset, day after day, until he reached a sea-shore again. That would be Africa or Arabia, and Moussa Isa would be where a Somal is known from a _Hubshi_.... Should he make a bolt for it now? No, too weak, and not fair to this kind Sahib who had healed him and sympathized with him in the matter of the ignorance and impudence of those who misnamed a son of the Somals.... In due course, the Committee of Visitors met at the Reformatory one morning, and found on the agenda paper _inter alia_ the case of Moussa Isa, a murderer from Aden, his attempt at murder and suicide, and his prayer to be sent to Aden Jail.

On the Committee were the Director of Public Instruction, the Collector, the Executive Engineer, the Superintendent of Duri Jail, the Educational Inspector, the Cantonment Magistrate, Major Jackson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and a number of Indian gentlemen. To the Chairman's inquiries Moussa Isa made the usual replies. He had been mortally affronted and had endeavoured to avenge the insult. He had tried to do his duty to himself--and to his enemy. He had been put to base women's-work as a punishment for defending his honour and he had tried to take his life in despair. Was there _no_ justice in British lands? What would the Sahib himself do if his honour were assailed? If one rose up and insulted him and his race? Called him baboon, born of baboons, for example? Or had the Sahib no honour? Why should he have been transported when he was not sentenced to transportation? What had he done but defend his honour and avenge insults? Unless he were now tried for murder and suicide, and sentenced to hard labour in Aden Jail, he would go on murdering until they did send him there. If they said, "Well, you shan't go there, whatever you do," he would kill himself. If he could get no sort of weapon he would starve himself (he did not in his ignorance quote the gentle and joyous Pankhurst family) or hold his breath. So they had better send him, and that was all he had got to say about it.

"Send him for trial before the City Magistrate and recommend that he go to Aden Jail at once, before he hurts somebody else," said the native members of the Committee. "Why should we be troubled with the off-scourings of Aden?"

"Certainly not," opined the Collector of Duri. A pretty state of affairs if every criminal were to be allowed to select his own place of punishment, and to terrorize any penitentiary that had the misfortune to lack favour in his sight. Let the boy be well flogged for the assault and attempted suicide, and then let him rejoin the ordinary gangs and classes. It was the Superintendent's duty to watch his charges and keep discipline in what was, after all, a school.

"Sir, he is one violent and dangerous character and will assault the peaceful and mild. Yea--he may even attack _me_," objected the babu.

"Are we to understand that you admit your inability to maintain order in this Reformatory?" inquired the Director of Public Instruction from the Chair.

Anything but that. They were to understand, on the contrary, that the babu was respectfully a most unprecedented disciplinarian.

"You don't expect cock angels in a Reformatory, y' know," said the engineer, suddenly awaking to light a fat black cheroot. "Got to use the--ah--strong hand;--on their--ah--_you_ know," and he resumed his slumbers, puffing mechanically and unconsciously at his cheroot.

So Moussa Isa was flogged and sent back to gardening, lessons and drawing.

Yes--the Somali was taught drawing. Not mere utilitarian drawing-to-scale and making plans and elevations, but "freehand"-drawing, the reproducing of meaningless twirly curves and twiddly twists from symmetrical conventional "copies". He copied copies and drew lines--but never copied things, nor drew things. In time he could, with infinite labour, produce a copy of a flat "copy" that a really observant eye could identify with the original, but had you asked him to draw his foot or the door of the room, his desk, his watering-can or book, he would probably have replied, "_They_ are not drawing-copies," and would have laughed at your absurd joke. No, he was not taught to draw _things_, nor to give expression to impression.

And he had a special warder all to himself, who watched him as a cat watches a mouse. However, warders cannot prevent looks and smiles, and whenever Moussa Isa saw the Brahmin youth, he gave a peculiar look and a meaning smile. It was borne in upon the clever young man that the Hubshi looked at his neck, below his ear, when he smiled that dreadful smile.

Sometimes a significant gesture accompanied the meaning smile. For Moussa Isa had decided, upon the rejection of his prayer by the Committee, to wait until he was a little older and bigger, more like a proper criminal and less of a wretched little "juvenile offender," and then to qualify, by murder, for the Aden Jail--with the unoffered help of the Brahmin boy.

Allah would vouchsafe opportunity, and when he did so, Moussa Isa, his servant, would seize it. Doubtless it would come as soon as he was big enough to receive the privileges of an adult and serious criminal. Anyhow, the insult would be properly punished and the honour of the Somal race avenged....

Came the day when certain of the sinful inhabitants of the Duri Reformatory were to be conducted to a neighbouring Government High School, a centre for the official Drawing Examinations for the district, there to sit and be examined in the gentle art of Art.

To this end they had been trained in the copying of lines and in the painting of areas of conventional shape, not that they might be made to observe natural form, express themselves in reproduction, render the inner outer, originate, articulate ... but that they might pass an examination in copying unnatural things in impossible colours. Thus it came to pass that, in the big hall of this school, divers of the Reformed found themselves copying, and colouring the copy of, a curious picture pinned to a blackboard--the picture of a floral wonder unknown to Botany, possessed of delicate mauve leaves, blue-veined, shaped some like the oak-leaf and some like the ivy; of long slender blades like those of the iris, but of tenderest pink; of beautiful and profusely chromatic blossoms, reminding one now of the orchid, now of the sunflower and anon of the forget-me-not; and likewise of clustering fulgent fruit.

And at the back of all these budding artists and blossoming jail-birds, and in the same small desk sat the Brahmin youth and--Oh Merciful Allah!--Moussa Isa, Somali.

The native gentleman in charge of the party from the Duri Reformatory had duly escorted his charges into the hall, handed them over to Mr. Edward Jones, the Head of the High School, and been requested to wait outside with similar custodians of parties. (Mr. Edward Jones had known very strange things to happen in Examination Halls to which the friends and supporters of candidates had access during the examination.)

To Mr. Edward Jones the thus deserted Brahmin boy made frantic and piteous appeal.

"Oh, Sir," prayed he, "let me sit somewhere else and not beside this African."

"You'll stay where you are," replied Mr. Edward Jones, suspicious of the appeal and the appellant. If the fat glib youth objected to the African on principle, Mr. Edward Jones would be glad, metaphorically speaking, to rub his Brahminical nose in it. If this were not his reason, it was, doubtless, one even less creditable. Mr. Edward Jones had been in India long enough to learn to look very carefully for the motive.

Moussa Isa licked his chops once again, and, as Mr. Jones turned away, the unhappy Brahmin cried in his anguish of soul:--

"Oh, Sir! Watch this African carefully."

"All will be watched carefully," was the suspicious and cold reply.

Moussa smiled broadly upon his erstwhile contemptuous and insulting enemy, and began to consider the possibilities of a long and well-pointed lead-pencil as a means of vengeance. Pencils were intended for marking fair surfaces--might one not be used on this occasion for the cleaning of a sullied surface, that of a besmirched honour?

One insulter of the Somal race had died by the stab of a piece of broken bottle. Might not another die by the stab of a lead-pencil?

Doubtful. Very risky. The stabbing and piercing potentialities of a lead pencil are not yet properly investigated, tabulated, established and known. It would be a pity to do small damage and incur a heavy corn-grinding punishment. He might never get another chance of vengeance either, if he bungled this one.

Well, there were three hours in which to decide ... and Moussa Isa commenced to draw, pausing, from time to time, to smile meaningly at the Brahmin, and to lick his chops suggestively. Anon he rested from his highly uninteresting and valueless labours, laid his pencil on the desk, and gazed around in search of inspiration in the matter of the best method of dealing with his enemy.

His eye fell upon a picture of a lion that ornamented the wall of the hall; he stiffened like a pointer and fingered some scars on his right arm. He had never seen a picture of a lion before and, for a fraction of a second, he was shocked and alarmed--and then, while his body sat in an Indian High School hall, his spirit flew to an East African desert, and there sojourned awhile.

Moussa Isa was again the slave of an ivory-poaching, hide-poaching, specimen-poaching, slave-dealing gang of Arabs, Negroes, and Portuguese half-castes, led by a white man of the Teutonic persuasion. He could feel the smiting heat, see the scrub, jungle, and sand shimmering and dancing in the heat haze. He could see the line of porters, bales on heads, the Arabs on horseback, the white man in a litter swinging from a long bamboo pole beneath which half a dozen Swahili loped along. He could see the velvet star-gemmed night and the camp-fires, smell the smoke and the savoury odours of the cooking, hear the sudden shrieks and yells that followed the roar of the springing lion, feel the crushing crunch of its great teeth in his arm as it seized him from beside the nearest fire and stood over him.... Yes, that was the night when the fair Sheikh from the North had showed the mettle of his pastures and bound Moussa Isa to him for ever in the bonds of worshipping gratitude and love. For, while others shrieked, yelled, fled, flung burning brands and spears, or fired hasty, unaimed, ineffectual shots, the fair Sheikh from the North had sprung at the lion as it stood over Moussa Isa and driven his knife into its eye, and as it smote him to the earth, buried its fangs in his shoulder and started to drag him away, had stabbed upward between the ribs, giving it a second death-blow, transfixing its heart. Thus it was he had earned the name by which he was known from Zanzibar to Berbera, "He-who-slays-lions-with-the-knife," had earned the envy and hatred of the fat white man and the Arabs, the boundless admiration of the Swahili askaris, hunters and porters, and the deep dog-like affection of Moussa Isa....

And then Moussa's spirit returned to his body and he saw but the picture of a lion on a High School wall. He commenced to draw again and suddenly had an inspiration. Deliberately he broke the point of his pencil and, rising, marched up to the dais, whereon, at a table, sat Mr. Edward Jones.

Mr. Edward Jones had been shot with bewildering suddenness from Cambridge quadrangles into the Indian Educational Service. Of India he knew nothing, of education he knew less, but boldly took it upon him to combine the two unknowns for the earning of his living. If wise and beneficent men offered him a modest wage for becoming a professor and exponent of that which he did not know, he had no objection to accepting it; but there were people who wondered why it should be that, out of forty million English people, Mr. Edward Jones should be the chosen one to represent England to the youth of Duri, and asked whether there were no keen, strictly conscientious, sporting, strong Englishmen available; no enthusiastic educational experts left in all the British Isles, that Mr. Edward Jones of all people had come to Duri?

"What do you want?" he asked (how he hated these poverty-stricken, smelly, ignoble creatures. Why was he not a master at Eton, instead of at Duri High School. Why wouldn't somebody give him a handsome income for looking handsome and standing around beautifully--like these aide-de-camp Johnnies and "staff" people. Since there was nothing on earth he could do well, he ought to have been provided with a job in which he could look well).

"May I borrow the Sahib's knife?" asked Moussa Isa, "I have broken my pencil and cannot draw." Mr. Edward Jones picked up the penknife that lay on his desk, the cheap article of restricted utility supplied to Government Offices by the Stationery Department, and handed it to Moussa Isa. Even as he took it with respectful salaam, Moussa Isa summed up its possibilities. Blade two inches long, sharp-pointed, handle six inches long, wooden; not a clasp knife, blade immovable in handle. It would do--and he turned to go to his seat and presumably to sharpen his pencil.

Idly watching the boy and thinking of other things, Jones saw him try the point of the knife on his thumb, walk up behind the other occupant of his desk, his Brahmin neighbour, seize that neighbour by the hair, push his head sharp over on to the shoulder, and plunge the knife into his neck; seat himself, and commence to draw with the unfortunate Brahmin's pencil.

Jones sprang to his feet and rushed to the spot, to find that he had not been dreaming. No--on the back seat drooped a boy bleeding like a stuck pig and another industriously drawing, his face illuminated by a smile of contentment.

Jones pressed his thumbs into the neck of the sufferer, as he called to an assistant-supervisor to run to the hospital for Dr. Almeida, hoping to be able to close the severed jugular from which welled an appalling stream of blood.

"It is quite useless, Sahib," observed Moussa, "nor can a doctor help. When one has got it _there_, he may give his spear to his son and turn his face to the wall. That dog will never say '_Hubshi_' to a Somal again."

"Catch hold of that boy," said Mr. Edward Jones to another assistant-supervisor who clucked around like a perturbed hen.

"Fear not, Sahib, I shall not escape. I go to Aden Jail," said Moussa cheerfully--but he pondered the advisability of attempting escape from the Reformatory should he be sentenced to be hanged. It had always seemed an impossibility, but it would be better to attempt the impossible than to await the rope. But doubtless they would say he was too small and light to hang satisfactorily, and would send him to Aden. Thanks, Master Brahmin, realize as you die that you have greatly obliged your slayer....

* * * * *

"Now you will most certainly be hanged to death by rope and I shall be rid of troublesome fellow," said the Superintendent to Moussa Isa when that murderous villain was temporarily handed over to him by the police-sepoy to whom he had been committed by Mr. Jones.

"I have avenged my people and myself," replied Moussa Isa, "even as I said, I go to Aden Jail--where there are _men_, and where a Somal is known from a Hubshi"

"You go to hang--across the road there at Duri Gaol," replied the babu, and earnestly hoped to find himself a true prophet. But though the wish was father to the thought, the expression thereof was but the wicked uncle, for it led to the undoing of the wish. So convinced and convincing did the babu appear to Moussa Isa, that the latter decided to try his luck in the matter of unauthorized departure from the Reformatory precincts. If they were going to hang him (for defending and purging his private and racial honour), and not send him to Aden after all, he might as well endeavour to go there at his own expense and independently. If he were caught they could not do more than hang him; if he were not caught he would get out of this dark ignorant land, if he had to walk for a year....

When he came to devote his mind to the matter of escape, Moussa Isa found it surprisingly easy. A sudden dash from his cell as the door was incautiously opened that evening, a bound and scramble into a tree, a leap to an out-house roof, another scramble, and a drop which would settle the matter. If something broke he was done, if nothing broke he was within a few yards of six-foot-high crops which extended to the confines of the jungle, wherein were neither police, telegraph offices, railways, roads, nor other apparatus of the enemy. Nothing broke--Duri Reformatory saw Moussa Isa no more. For a week he travelled only by night, and thereafter boldly by day, getting lifts in _bylegharies_,[45] doing odd jobs, living as the crows and jackals live when jobs were unavailable, receiving many a kindness from other wayfarers, especially those of the poorer sort, but always faring onward to the West, ever onward to the setting sun, always to the sea and Africa, until the wonderful and blessed day when he believed for a moment that he was mad and that his eyes and brain were playing him tricks.... After months and months of weary travel, always toward the setting sun, he had arrived one terrible evening of June at a wide river and a marvellous bridge--a great bridge hung by mighty chains upon mightier posts which stood up on either distant bank. It was a _pukka_ road, a Grand Trunk Road suspended in the air across a river well-nigh great as Father Nile himself.

[45] Bullock carts.

On the banks of this river stood an ancient walled city of tall houses separated by narrow streets, a city of smells and filth, wherein there were no Sahibs, few Hindus and many Mussulmans. In a mud-floored miserable _mussafarkhana_,[46] without its gates, Moussa Isa slept, naked, hungry and very sad--for he somehow seemed to have missed the sea. Surely if one kept on due westward always to the setting sun, one reached the sea in time? The time was growing long, however, and he was among a strange people, few of whom understood the Hindustani he had learnt at Duri. Luckily they were largely Mussulmans. Should he abandon the setting sun and take to the river, following it until it reached the sea? He could take ship then for Africa by creeping aboard in the darkness, and hiding himself until the ship had started.... There might be no city at the mouth of the river when he got there. It might never reach the sea. It might just vanish into some desert like the Webi-Shebeyli in Somaliland. No, he would keep on toward the West, crossing the great bridge in the morning. He did so, and turned aside to admire the railway-station of the Cantonment on the other side of the river, to get a drink, and to see a train come in, if happily such might occur.

[46] Poor travellers' rest-house.

Ere he had finished rinsing his mouth and bathing his feet at the public water-standard on the platform, the whistle of a distant train charmed his ears and he sat him down, delighted, to enjoy the sights and sounds, the stir and bustle, of its arrival and departure. And so it came about that certain passengers by this North West Frontier train were not a little intrigued to notice a small and very black boy suddenly arise from beside the drinking-fountain and, with a strange hoarse scream, fling himself at the feet of a young Englishman (who in Norfolk jacket and white flannel trousers strolled up and down outside the first-class carriage in which he was travelling to Kot Ghazi from Karachi), and with every sign of the wildest excitement and joy embrace and kiss his boots....

Moussa Isa was convinced that he had gone mad and that his eyes and brain were playing him tricks.

Mr. John Robin Ross-Ellison (also Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan when in other dress and other places) was likewise more than a little surprised--and certainly a little moved, at the sight of Moussa Isa and his wild demonstrations of uncontrollable joy.

"Well, I'm damned!" said he in the _rôle_ of Mr. John Robin Ross-Ellison. "Rum little devil. Fancy your turning up here." And in the _rôle_ of Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan added in debased Arabic: "Take this money, little dog, and buy thee a _tikkut_ to Kot Ghazi. Get into this train, and at Kot Ghazi follow me to a house."

To the house Moussa Isa followed him and to the end of his life likewise, visiting _en route_ Mekran Kot, among other places, and encountering one, Ilderim the Weeper, among other people (as was told to Major Michael Malet-Marsac by Ross-Ellison's half-brother, the Subedar-Major.)