hope you’ll profit by every word you’ve heard from the Colonel, my lad,” the Adjutant concluded, turning ferociously upon Bertram. “Don’t stand there giggling, flippant and indifferent—a perfect picture of the Idle Apprentice, I say,” and he burst into a peal of laughter at the solemn, anxious, tragic mask which was Bertram’s face.
“No,” he added, as they left the room. “Let the Colonel’s wise and pregnant observations sink into your mind and bring forth fruit. . . . Such blossoming, blooming flowers of rhetoric oughter bring forth fruit in due season, anyhow. . . . Come along o’ me.”
Leaving the big Mess bungalow, the two crossed the maidan, wherein numerous small squads of white-clad recruits were receiving musketry-instruction beneath the shady spread of gigantic banyans. The quickly signalled approach of the dread Adjutant-Sahib galvanised the Havildar and Naik instructors to a fearful activity and zeal, which waned not until he had passed from sight. In one large patch of shade the Bandmaster—an ancient Pathan, whose huge iron-rimmed spectacles accorded but incongruously with his fierce hawk face, ferocious curling white moustache and beard, and bemedalled uniform—was conducting the band’s tentative rendering of “My Bonnie is over the Ocean,” to Bertram’s wide-eyed surprise and interest. Through the Lines the two officers made a kind of Triumphal Progress, men on all sides stiffening to “attention” and saluting as they passed, to where, behind a cook-house, lay nine large smoke-blackened cooking-pots under a strong guard.
“There they are, my lad,” quoth the hitherto silent Adjutant. “Regard them closely, and consider them well. Familiarise yourself with them, and ponder.”
“Why?” asked Bertram.
“For in that it is likely that they, or their astral forms, will haunt your thoughts by day, your dreams by night. Your every path through life will lead to them,” answered the Adjutant.
“What have I got to do with them?” enquired Bertram, with uncomfortable visions of adding the nine big black cauldrons to his kit.
“Write about them,” was the succinct reply.
“To whom?” was the next query.
“Child,” said the Adjutant solemnly, “you are young and ignorant, though earnest. To you, in your simplicity and innocence—
‘A black cooking-pot by a cook-house door
A black cooking-pot is, and nothing more,’
as dear William Wordsworth so truly says in his Ode on the Imitations of Immorality, is it—or is it in ‘Hark how the Shylock at Heaven’s gate sings’? I forget. . . . But these are much more. Oh, very much.”
“How?” asked the puzzled but earnest one.
“How? . . . Why they are the subject-matter, from this moment, of a Correspondence which will be still going on when your children’s grandchildren are doddering grey-beards, and you and I are long since swept into the gulf of well-deserved oblivion. Babus yet unborn will batten on that Correspondence and provide posts for their relatives unnumbered as the sands of the seashore, that it may be carried on unfailing and unflagging. As the pen drops from their senile palsied hands they will see the Correspondence take new lease of life, and they will turn their faces to the wall, smile, and die happy.”
“I am afraid I don’t really understand,” admitted Bertram.
“Do you think Colonel Rock will return these pots? Believe me, he will not. He will say, ‘A pot in the hand is worth two in the bush-country,’ or else ‘What I have I hold,’ or ‘Ils suis, ils reste’—being a bit of a scholar like—or perhaps he’ll just swear he bought ’em off a man he went to see about a dog, just round the corner, at the pub. I don’t know about that—but return them he will not. . . .”
“But if I say they belong to Colonel Frost and that he wants them back—and that I promised to make it clear to him that Colonel Frost desires their immediate return,” protested Bertram, who visualised himself between the anvil of Colonel Rock and the hammer of Colonel Frost.
“Why then he’ll probably say they now ‘belong to Colonel Rock and that he doesn’t want them to go back, and that you must promise to make it clear to Colonel Frost that he desires his immediate return’—to the devil,” replied the Adjutant.
“Yes—every time,” he continued. “He will pretend that fighting Germans is a more urgent and important matter than returning pots. He will lay aside no plans of battle and schemes of strategy to attend to the pots. He will detail no force of trusty soldiers to convoy them to the coast. . . . He will refuse to keep them prominently before his vision. . . . In short, he will hang on to the damn things. . . . And when the war is o’er and he returns, he’ll swear he never had a single cooking-pot in Africa, and in any case they are his own private property, and always were. . . .”
“I shall have to keep on reminding him about them,” observed Bertram, endeavouring to separate the grain of truth from the literal “chaff” of the Adjutant—who seemed to be talking rapidly and with bitter humour, to keep himself from thinking of his cruel and crushing disappointment, or to hide his real feelings.
“If you go nightly to his tent, and, throwing yourself prostrate at his feet, clasp him around the knees, and say: ‘Oh, sir, think of poor pot-less Colonel Frost,’ he will reply: ‘To hell with Colonel Frost! . . .’ Yes—every time. . . . Until, getting impatient of your reproachful presence, he will say: ‘You mention pots again and I’ll fill you with despondency and alarm. . .’ He’ll do it, too—he’s quite good at it.”
“Rather an awkward position for me,” ventured Bertram.
“Oh, quite, quite,” agreed Murray. “Colonel Frost will wire that unless you return his pots, he’ll break you—and Colonel Rock will state that if you so much as hint at pots, he’ll break you. . . . But that’s neither here nor there—the Correspondence is the thing. It will begin when you are broke by one of the two—and it will be but waxing in volume to its grand climacteric when the war is forgotten, and the pots are but the dust of rust. . . . A great thought. . . Yes. . .”
Bertram stared at the Adjutant. Had he gone mad? Fever? A touch of the sun? It was none of these things, but a rather terrible blow, a blighting and a shattering of his almost-realised hopes—and he must either talk or throw things about, if he were not to sit down and blaspheme while he drank himself into oblivion. . . .
For a time they regarded the pots in awed contemplative silence and felt themselves but ephemeral in their presence, as they thought of the Great Correspondence, but yet with just a tinge of that comforting and sustaining quorum pais magna fui feeling, to which Man, the Mighty Atom, the little devil of restless interference with the Great Forces, is ever prone.
In chastened silence they returned to the Adjutant’s office, and Bertram sat by his desk and watched and wondered, while that official got through the rest of his morning’s work and dealt faithfully with many—chiefly sinners.
He then asked the Native Adjutant, who had been assisting him, to send for Jemadar Hassan Ali, who was to accompany Bertram and the draft on the morrow, and on that officer’s arrival he presented him to the young gentleman.
As he bowed and shook hands with the tall, handsome Native Officer, Bertram repressed a tendency to enquire after Mrs. Ali and all the little Allies, remembering in time that to allude directly to a native gentleman’s wife is the grossest discourtesy and gravest immorality. All he could find to say was: “Salaam, Jemadar Sahib! Sub achcha hai?” 7 which at any rate appeared to serve, as the Native Officer gave every demonstration of cordiality and pleasure. What he said in reply, Bertram did not in the least understand, so he endeavoured to put on a look combining pleasure, comprehension, friendliness and agreement—which he found a slight strain—and remarked: “Béshak! Béshak!” 8 as he nodded his head. . . .
The