you, and those tits quivering under your nose, I submit that you might have been taken in yourself, and glad of it.
In any event, it didn't make a ha'porth of difference. Even if I'd suspected her then, I was in her power, and she could have wrung all the details of Rose's scheme out of me and made her escape anyway. I'd have been dragged along at her tail, and finished up in the Gwalior dungeons just the same. And mind you, I'm still not certain how far she was humbugging me; all I know is that if she was play-acting, she seemed to be enjoying her work.
More than I enjoyed Gwalior, at any rate. That's a fearful place, a huge, rocky fortress of a city, bigger than Jhansi, and said to be the most powerful hold in India. I can speak with authority only about its dungeons, which were a shade worse than a Mexican jail, if you can imagine that. I spent the better part of two months in them, cooped in a bottle-shaped cell with my own filth and only rats, fleas and cockroaches for company, except when Sher Khan came to have a look at me, about once a week, to make sure I hadn't up and died on him.
He and his fellow-Pathan took me there on Lakshmibai's orders, and it was one of the most punishing rides I've ever endured. I was almost unconscious in the saddle by the time we reached it, for the brutes never took my chain off once in the hundred miles we covered: I think, too, that my spirit had endured more than I could stand, for after all I'd gone through there were moments now when I no longer cared whether I lived or died — and I have to be pretty far down before that happens. When they brought me to Gwalior by night, and half-carried me into the fortress, and dropped me into that stinking, ill-lit cell, I just lay and sobbed like an infant, babbling aloud about Meerut and Cawnpore and Lucknow and Thugs and crocodiles and evil bitches — and now this. Would you believe it, the worst was yet to come?
I don't care to dwell on it, so I'll hurry along. While I was in that dungeon at Gwalior, waiting for I didn't know what, and half-believing that I'd rot there forever, or go mad first, the final innings of the Mutiny was being played out. Campbell was settling things north of the Jumnah, and Rose, having captured Jhansi, was pushing north after Tantia Tope and my ministering angel, Lakshmibai, who'd taken the field with him. He beat them at Calpee and Kanch, driving them towards Gwalior where I was enjoying the local hospitality. The odd thing was, that at the time I was incarcerated there, Gwalior's ruler, Maharaja Scindia, had remained neutral in the rebellion, and had no business to be allowing his prison to be used for the accommodation of captured British officers. In fact, of course, he (or his chief advisers) were sympathetic to the rebels all along, as was proved in the end. For after their defeat at Calpee, Tantia and Lakshmibai turned to Gwalior, and the Maharaja's army went over to them, almost without firing a shot. So there they were, the last great rebel force in India, in possession of India's greatest stronghold — and with Rose closing inexorably in on them.
I knew nothing of all this, of course; mouldering in my cell, with my beard sprouting and my hair matting, and my pandy uniform foul and stinking (for I'd never had it off since I put it on in Rose's camp), I might as well have been at the North Pole. Day followed day, and week followed week without a cheep from the outside world, for Sher Khan hardly said a word to me, although I raved and pleaded with him whenever he poked his face through the trap into my cell. That's the worst of that kind of imprisonment — not knowing, and losing count of the days, and wondering whether you've been there a month to a year, and whether there is really a world outside at all, and doubting if you ever did more than dream that you were once a boy playing in the fields at Rugby, or a man who'd walked in the Park, or ridden by Albert Gate, saluting the ladies, or played billiards, or followed hounds, or gone up the Mississippi in a side-wheeler, or watched the moon rise over Kuching River, or — you can wonder ii any of it ever existed, or if these greasy black walls are perhaps the only world that ever was, or will be … that's when you start to go mad, unless you can find something to think about that you know is real.
I've heard of chaps who kept themselves sane in solitary confinement by singing all the hymns they knew, or proving the propositions of Euclid, or reciting poetry. Each to his taste: I'm no hand at religion, or geometry, and the only repeatable poem I can remember is an Ode of Horace which Arnold made me learn as a punishment for farting at prayers. So instead I compiled a mental list of all the women I'd had in my life, from that sweaty kitchen-maid in Leicestershire when I was fifteen, up to the half-caste piece I'd been reprimanded for at Cawnpore, and to my astonishment there were four hundred and seventy-eight of them, which seemed rather a lot, especially since I wasn't counting return engagements. It's astonishing, really, when you think how much time it must have taken up.
Perhaps because I'd been listing them I had a frightful dream one night in which I had to dance with all of them at a ball on the slave-deck of the Balliol College, with the demoniac Captain Spring conducting the music in a cocked hat and white gloves. They were all there — Lola Montez and Josette and Judy (my guvnor's mistress, she was), and the Silk One and Susie from New Orleans and fat Baroness Pechmann and Nareeman the nautch, and all the others, and each one left her slave-fetters with me so that I must dance on loaded and clanking, crying out with exhaustion, but when I pleaded for rest Spring just rolled his eyes and made the music go faster, with the big drum booming. Elspeth and Palmerston waltzed by, and Pam gave me his false teeth and cried: 'You'll need 'em for eating chapattis with your next partner, you know' — and it was Lakshmibai, naked and glitter-eyed over her veil, and she seized me and whirled me round the floor, almost dead with fatigue and the cruel weight of the chains, while the drum went boom-boom-boom faster and faster — and I was awake, gasping and clutching at my filthy straw with the sound of distant gunfire in my ears.
It went on all that day, and the next, but of course I couldn't tell what it meant or who was firing, and I was too done to care. All through the morning of the third day it continued, and then suddenly my trap was thrown open, and I was being dragged out by Sher Khan and another fellow, and I hardly knew where I was. When you're hauled out of a dead captivity like that, everything seems frighteningly loud and fast — I know there was a courtyard, full of nigger soldiers running about and shouting, and their pipes blaring, and the gunfire crashing louder than ever — but the shock of release was too much for me to make sense of it. I was half-blinded just by the light of the sky, although it was heavy with red and black monsoon clouds, and I remember thinking, it'll be capital growing weather soon.
It wasn't till they thrust me on a pony that I came to myself — instinct, I suppose, but when I felt the saddle under me, and the beast stirring, and the smell of horse in my nostrils and my feet in stirrups, I was awake again. I knew this was Gwalior fortress, with the massive gate towering in front of me, and a great gun being dragged through it by a squealing elephant, with a troop of red-coated nigger-prince's cavalry waiting to ride out, and a bedlam of men shouting orders: the din was still deafening, but as Sher Khan mounted his pony beside me I yelled:
'What's happening? Where are we going?'
'She wants you!' cries he, and grinned as he tapped his hilt. 'So she shall have you. Come!'
He thrust a way for us through the crowd milling in the gateway, and I followed, still trying to drink in the sights and sounds of this madhouse that I had all but forgotten — men and carts and bullocks and dust and the clatter of arms: a bhisti running with his water-skin, a file of pandy infantry squatting by the roadside with their muskets between their knees, a child scrambling under a bullock's belly, a great-chested fellow in a spiked cap with a green banner on a pole over his shoulder, a spindly-legged old nigger shuffling along regardless of them all, the smell of cooking ghee, and through it all that muffled crash of cannon in the distance.
I stared ahead as we emerged from the gate, trying to understand what was happening. Gunfire — that meant that British troops were somewhere near, and the sight that met my eyes confirmed it. Before me there was miles of open plain, stretching to distant hills, and the plain was alive with men and animals and all the tackle of war. Perhaps a mile ahead, in the haze, there were tents, and the unmistakable ranks of infantry, and gun emplacements, and squadrons of horse on the move — a whole army stretched across a front of perhaps two miles. I steadied myself as Sher Khan urged me forward, trying to take it in — it was a rebel army, no error, for there were pandy formations moving back towards us, and native state infantry and riders in uniforms I didn't know, men in crimson robes with little shields and curved tulwars, and gun-teams with artillery pieces fantastically carved in the native fashion.
That was the first fact: the second was that they were retreating, and on the edge of rout. For the formations were moving towards us, and the road itself was choked with men and beasts and vehicles heading for Gwalior. A horse-artillery team was careering in, the gunners clinging to the limbers and their officer lashing at the beasts, a platoon of pandies was coming at the double-quick, their ranks ragged, their faces streaked with dust and sweat, and all along the road men were running or hobbling back, singly and in little groups: I'd seen the signs often enough, the gaping mouths, the wide eyes, the bloody bandages, the high-pitched voices, the half-ordered haste slipping into utter confusion, the abandoned muskets at the roadside, the exhausted men sitting or lying or crying
