P. C. Wren: Adventure Novels & Tales From the Foreign Legion. P. C. Wren
was the General's boast that he had never feed a doctor in his life, and his impression that a sound resort for any kind of invalid is a lethal chamber….
The seven years since the Major had last seen her, seemed to have dealt lightly with the sad-faced, pretty Miss Yvette, gentle, good, and very kind. Over the boy she rhapsodized to her own content and his embarrassment. Effusive endearments and embraces were new to Dam, and he appeared extraordinarily ignorant of the art of kissing.
"Oh, how like his dear Father!" she would exclaim afresh every few minutes, to the Major's slight annoyance and the General's plain disgust.
"Every inch a Stukeley!" he would growl in reply.
But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition. Possibly Fate's greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental image…. The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of her life's hero and beloved….
The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, butlerless and ghari9-less sahibs, and an utter absence of "natives," sepoys, byle-gharies,10 camels, monkeys, kites, squirrels, bulbuls, minahs,11 mongooses, palm-trees, and temples. Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees to have no fruit. The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the cold season. Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather! Perhaps there was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange country of strange people, strange food, strange customs. Nobody seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts, nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country. A queer, foreign land.
But Monksmead was a most magnificent "bungalow" standing in a truly beautiful "compound"—wherein the very bhistis12 and mallis were European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.
Marvellous was the interior of the bungalow with its countless rooms and mountainous stair-cases (on the wall of one of which hung the Sword which he had never seen but instantly recognized) and its army of white servants headed by the white butler (so like the Chaplain of Bimariabad in grave respectability and solemn pompousness) and its extraordinary white "ayahs" or maids, and silver-haired Mrs. Pont, called the "house-keeper". Was she a pukka Mem-Sahib or a nowker13 or what? And how did she "keep" the house?
A wonderful place—but far and away the most thrilling and delightful of its wonders was the little white girl, Lucille—Damocles' first experience of the charming genus.
The boy never forgot his first meeting with Lucille.
On his arrival at Monksmead he had been "vetted," as he expressed it, by the Burra-Sahib, the General; and then taken to an attractive place called "the school-room" and there had found Lucille….
"Hullo! Boy," had been her greeting. "What's your name?" He had attentively scrutinized a small white-clad, blue-sashed maiden, with curling chestnut hair, well-opened hazel eyes, decided chin, Greek mouth and aristocratic cheek-bones. A maiden with a look of blood and breed about her. (He did not sum her up in these terms at the time.)
"Can you ride, Boy?"
"A bit."
"Can you fight?"
"A bit."
"Can you swim?"
"Not well."
"I can—ever so farther. D'you know French and German?"
"Not a word."
"Play the piano?"
"Never heard of it. D'you play it with cards or dice?"
"Lucky dog! It's music. I have to practise an hour a day."
"What for?"
"Nothing … it's lessons. Beastly. How old are you?"
"Seven—er—nearly."
"So'm I—nearly. I've got to be six first though. I shall have a birthday next week. A big one. Have you brought any ellyfunts from India?"
"I've never seen a nellyfunt—only in pictures."
A shudder shook the boy's sturdy frame.
"Why do you go like that? Feel sick?"
"No. I don't know. I seemed to remember something—in a book. I dream about it. There's a nasty blue room with a mud floor. And Something. Beastly. Makes you yell out and you can't. You can't run away either. But the Sword dream is lovely."
Lucille appeared puzzled and put this incoherence aside.
"What a baby never to see ellyfunts! I've seen lots. Hundreds. Zoo. Circuses. Persessions. Camels, too."
"Oh, I used to ride a camel every day. There was one in the compound with his oont-wallah,14 Abdul Ghaffr; and Khodadad Khan used to beat the oont-wallah on cold mornings to warm himself."
"What's an oont-wallah?"
"Don't you know? Why, he's just the oont-wallah, of course. Who'd graze the camel or load it up if there wasn't one?"
At tea in the nursery the young lady suddenly remarked:—
"I like you, Boy. You're worth nine Haddocks."
This cryptic valuation puzzled Damocles the more in that he had never seen or heard of a haddock. Had he been acquainted with the fowl he might have been yet more astonished.
Later he discovered that the comparison involved the fat boy who sat solemnly stuffing on the other side of the table, his true baptismal name being Haddon.
Yes, Lucille was a revelation, a marvel.
Far quicker of mind than he, cleverer at games and inventing "make believe," very strong, active, and sporting, she was the most charming, interesting, and attractive experience in his short but eventful life.
How he loved to make her laugh and clap her hands! How he enjoyed her quaint remarks, speculations, fairy-tales and jokes. How he yearned to win her approval and admiration. How he strove to please her!
In Lucille and his wonderful new surroundings he soon forgot Major Decies, who returned to live (and, at a ripe old age, to die) at Bimariabad, where had lived and died the woman whom he had so truly and purely loved. The place where he had known her was the only place for him.
On each of his birthdays Damocles received a long fatherly letter and a handsome present from the Major, and by the time he went away to school at Wellingborough, he wondered who on earth the Major might be.
To his great delight Damocles found that he was not doomed to discontinue his riding, fencing, boxing, and "dismounted drill without arms".
General Seymour Stukeley sent for a certain Sergeant Havlan (once a trooper in his own regiment), rough-rider, swordsman, and boxer, now a professional trainer, and bade him see that the boy learned all he could teach him of arms and horsemanship, boxing, swimming, and general physical prowess and skill. Lucille and Haddon Berners were to join in to the extent