Читать книгу The Iblis at Ludd - Talbot Mundy - Страница 5

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They went down the Mount of Olives at Goodenough’s usual speed, which was not based on such considerations as the view, or the nerves either, of Jerusalem, and brought up presently in a cloud of dust in front of a marquee behind a barbed-wire fence on the outskirts of the city. Two minutes later Narayan Singh, lean, enormous, bearded, looked straight into his colonel’s eyes across the table.

“You’re to go with this officer, Narayan Singh.”

“Atcha, sahib.”

“You’re to bring him back from Ludd alive.”

“Atcha, sahib.”

“Otherwise do whatever he tells you to.”

“Atcha, colonel sahib.”

“March with your kit to the station and meet Major Grim there in time for the morning train. Dismiss.”

The Sikh saluted and fell away, but his brown eyes met Jim’s with a flare of gratitude. It was almost ferocious, like the expression of a hound unchained for sport. Jim nodded to him, but neither said a word.

Jim borrowed the colonel’s car and drove to the junior staff officer’s mess, where he went upstairs in a hurry. Finding nobody in his own room, he went on up to the attic and stooped over an enormous packing-case. Groping in it, he pulled out a black foot, followed by a small boy, whose wooly hair suggested the Sudan and a mother sold into Arab slavery. His features were certainly Arabic.

“You lucky, lucky little devil! Twelve hours’ sleep out of twenty- four—just think of it! Wake up now and pack you kit; roll it into your blanket and come with me to the station.”

“What is it, Jimgrim? Are we transferred?”

“You’ve got to learn to ask no questions when you get your marching- orders.”

“All right, Jimgrim.”

“Narayan Singh will inspect that kit when you get to the station. Better be careful.”

He left the boy sleepily arranging on a blanket all the odds and ends that had appealed to his eight-year-old imagination since Jim discovered him starving one winter night in the drafty archway of the Jaffa Gate. They were pretty much the same things that a small boy born in America would choose—a tin can, a broken knife, a mouth-organ, a picture out of a magazine, an incomplete pack of playing cards, some half-smoked cigarettes and a broken mousetrap—all frightfully important.

Jim packed into his own kit three complete changes of native costume, and was ready first.

Narayan Singh was the only one of Jim’s friends who did not object to Suliman; the only one who took it for granted that the profit of fostering a small boy might outweigh the trouble, and who was thoroughly willing to share the trouble and forego all profit.

The Sikh took charge of Suliman at the station, made him unroll his kit on the platform, rebuked him because the broken knife-blade was not clean, solemnly suggested proper ways of polishing the outside of a tine box, and invent on the spot the only moral and properly complicated way of packing such possessions in a blanket.

In the flat-wheeled train that bumped and pounded through the gorge leading down from Jerusalem Narayan Singh came forward from the third-class end of the train to find Jim.

“The butcha will make a man, sahib,” he announced.

“Why, what’s his latest?”

“I asked him what he supposes our sahib intends to do with him at Ludd.

“‘Though I could hide in your beard, Narayan Singh,’ he said, ‘and you have killed your man a dozen times, yet I shall be a soldier before you are. For though you do not know enough not know enough not to ask questions when you have had marching orders, nevertheless I know enough not to answer you.’ How is that, sahib, from a butcha hardly higher than my knee?”

“He learns. But see he doesn’t smoke too much, and when he swears beat him.”

Brigadier-General Jenkins was on the station-platform at Ludd, cutting quite a figure, what with his upstanding bulk and the number of obedient subalterns grouped all about him. The set stage was obvious at once. The administrator’s motor had evidently come faster than the train. Jenkins had been ordered to accept an apology, and for lack of any better means of showing spite had arranged to make it as public as possible.

Jim, with Narayan Singh at his heels carrying all the baggage, walked straight up to him and saluted.

“Well, Major Grim?”

“I apologize.”

Jenkins turned a little to one side in order better to include the crowd.

“What for?”

“For presuming to speak to you as a man and my equal the other day instead of as a person of higher rank. I withdraw all I said, including the imputation. Do you accept?”

Jenkins nodded. Having his orders from higher up, it was all he could do. The subalterns smirked as he turned on his heel, and two or three of them winked at Jim. Narayan Singh was the only one who spoke, growling into Jim’s ear as he once more gathered up the baggage:

“Lead on, Jimgrim, sahib. I have seen the day when stronger boars than that one bit the dust!”