'The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib's body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.'
'And--and you white men wait at table on horseback?' Stalky pointed to the man's spurs.
'These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England,' said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said 'Six months.'
'But he'll take another six on medical certificate,' said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.
'You don't want to--eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing.' Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.
'Ah!' said the Infant. 'I've only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We're just ourselves. What flower is your honour's ladyship commanding for the table?'
'Just ourselves?' she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall. 'Then let's have marigolds the little cemetery ones.'
So it was ordered.
Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam's servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.
Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din--shoeless, out of respect to the floors--brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.
'Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,' said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.
'Now what d'you expect to get out of your country?' the Infant asked, when--our India laid aside we talked Adam's Africa. It roused him at once.
'Rubber -nuts -gums -and so on,' he said. 'But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.'
'My District!' said his father. 'Hear him, Mummy!'
'I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.'
'But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?' she asked.
'My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.'
'Ah! What was your Chief like?' Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.
'The best man alive--absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him'--Adam jerked out some heathen phrase--'that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.'
'I'm glad of that. Because I've heard from other quarters' Stalky's sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. 'Other quarters!' Adam threw out a thin hand. 'Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!' The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father's policemen twenty years before, and his mother's eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man's first love or loyalty.
A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.
'I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our shirts,' said the voice of Imam Din.
'Does he know as much English as that?' cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.
We all admired the cotton for Adam's sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.
'It's--it's only an experiment,' he said. 'We're such awful paupers we can't even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that'--he patted the stuff--'by a pure fluke.'
'How much did it cost?' asked Strickland.
'With seed and machinery--about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals.'
'That sounds promising.' Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.
'No, thank you,' said Agnes. 'I've been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I'll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday's hymns.'
She lifted the boy's hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant's ancestors' banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians' gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.
'There's an abominable self-playing attachment here!' she called.
'Me!' the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder. 'That's how I play Parsifal.'
'I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.'
We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.
'Now for the direct expression,' said Stalky, and moved on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich fever-thinned blood.
'It's nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We
