Louis Tracy - The Red Year - A Story of the Indian Mutiny

On a day in January, 1857, a sepoy was sitting by a well in the cantonment of Dum-Dum, near Calcutta. Though he wore the uniform of John Company, and his rank was the lowest in the native army, he carried on his forehead the caste-marks of the Brahmin. In a word, he was more than noble, being of sacred birth, and the Hindu officers of his regiment, if they were not heaven-born Brahmins, would grovel before him in secret, though he must obey their slightest order on parade or in the field.

To him approached a Lascar.

“Brother,” said the newcomer, “lend me your brass pot, so that I may drink, for I have walked far in the sun.”

The sepoy started as though a snake had stung him. Lascars, the sailor-men of India, were notoriously free-and-easy in their manners. Yet how came it that even a low-caste mongrel of a Lascar should offer such an overt insult to a Brahmin!

“Do you not know, swine-begotten, that your hog’s lips would contaminate my lotah?” asked he, putting the scorn of centuries into the words.

“Contaminate!” grinned the Lascar, neither frightened nor angered. “By holy Ganga, it is your lips that are contaminated, not mine. Are not the Government greasing your cartridges with cow’s fat? And can you load your rifle without biting the forbidden thing? Learn more about your own caste, brother, before you talk so proudly to others.”

Not a great matter, this squabble between a sepoy and a Lascar, yet it lit such a flame in India that rivers of blood must be shed ere it was quenched. The Brahmin’s mind reeled under the shock of the retort. It was true, then, what the agents of the dethroned King of Oudh were saying in the bazaar. The Government were bent on the destruction of Brahminical supremacy. He and his caste-fellows would lose all that made life worth living. But they would exact a bitter price for their fall from high estate.

“Kill!” he murmured in his frenzy, as he rushed away to tell his comrades the lie that made the Indian Mutiny possible. “Slay and spare not! Let us avenge our wrongs so fully that no accursed Feringhi shall dare again to come hither across the Black Water!”

The lie and the message flew through India with the inconceivable speed with which such ill tidings always travels in that country. Ever north went the news that the British Raj was doomed. Hindu fakirs, aglow with religious zeal, Mussalman zealots, as eager for dominance in this world as for a houri-tenanted Paradise in the next, carried the fiery torch of rebellion far and wide. And so the flame spread, and was fanned to red fury, though the eyes of few Englishmen could see it, while native intelligence was aghast at the supineness of their over-lords.

One evening in the month of April, a slim, straight-backed girl stood in the veranda of a bungalow at Meerut. Her slender figure, garbed in white muslin, was framed in a creeper-covered arch. The fierce ardor of an Indian spring had already kissed into life a profusion of red flowers amid the mass of greenery, and, if Winifred Mayne had sought an effective setting for her own fair picture, she could not have found one better fitted to its purpose.

But she was young enough and pretty enough to pay little heed to pose or background. In fact, so much of her smooth brow as could be seen under a broad-brimmed straw hat was wrinkled in a decided frown. Happily, her bright brown eyes had a glint of humor in them, for Winifred’s wrath was an evanescent thing, a pallid sprite, rarely seen, and ever ready to be banished by a smile.

“There!” she said, tugging at a refractory glove. “Did you hear it? It actually shrieked as it split. And this is the second pair. I shall never again believe a word Behari Lal says. Wait till I see him. I’ll give him such a talking to.”

“Then I have it in my heart to envy Behari Lal,” said her companion, glancing up at her from the carriage-way that ran by the side of the few steps leading down from the veranda.

“Indeed! May I ask why?” she demanded.

“Because you yield him a privilege you deny to me.”

“I was not aware you meant to call to-day. As it is, I am paying a strictly ceremonial visit. I wish I could speak Hindustani. Now, what would you say to Behari Lal in such a case?”

“I hardly know. When I buy gloves, I buy them of sufficient size. Of course, you have small hands – ”

“Thank you. Please don’t trouble to explain. And now, as you have been rude to me, I shall not take you to see Mrs. Meredith.”

“But that is a kindness.”

“Then you shall come, and be miserable.”

“For your sake, Miss Mayne, I would face Medusa, let alone the excellent wife of our Commissary-General, but fate, in the shape of an uncommonly headstrong Arab, forbids. I have just secured a new charger, and he and I have to decide this evening whether I go where he wants to go, or he goes where I want to go. I wheedled him into your compound by sheer trickery. The really definite issue will be settled forthwith on the Grand Trunk Road.”

“I hope you are not running any undue risk,” said the girl, with a sudden note of anxiety in her voice that was sweetest music to Frank Malcolm’s ears. For an instant he had a mad impulse to ask if she cared, but he crushed it ruthlessly, and his bantering reply gave no hint of the tumult in his breast. Yet he feared to meet her eyes, and was glad of a saluting sepoy who swaggered jauntily past the open gate.

“I don’t expect to be deposited in the dust, if that is what you mean,” he said. “But there is a fair chance that instead of carrying me back to Meerut my friend Nejdi will take me to Aligarh. You see, he is an Arab of mettle. If I am too rough with him, it will break his spirit; if too gentle, he will break my neck. He needs the main de fer sous le gant de velours . Please forgive me! I really didn’t intend to mention gloves again.”

“Oh, go away, you and your Arab. You are both horrid. You dine here to-morrow night, my uncle said?”

“Yes, if I don’t send you a telegram from Aligarh. I may be brought there, you know, against my will.”

Lifting his hat, he walked towards a huge pipal tree in the compound. Beneath its far-flung branches a syce was sitting in front of a finely-proportioned and unusually big Arab horse. Both animal and man seemed to be dozing, but they woke into activity when the sahib approached. The Arab pricked his ears, swished his long and arched tail viciously, and showed the whites of his eyes. A Bedouin of the desert, a true scion of the incomparable breed of Nejd, he was suspicious of civilization, and his new owner was a stranger, as yet.

“Ready for the fray, I see,” murmured Malcolm with a smile. He wasted no time over preliminaries. Bidding the syce place his thumbs in the steel rings of the bridle, the young Englishman gathered the reins and a wisp of gray mane in his left hand. Seizing a favorable moment, when the struggling animal flinched from the touch of a low-lying branch on the off side, he vaulted into the saddle. Chunga, the syce, held on until his master’s feet had found the stirrups. Then he was told to let go, and Miss Winifred Mayne, niece of a Commissioner of Oudh, quite the most eligible young lady the Meerut district could produce that year, witnessed a display of cool, resourceful horsemanship as the enraged Arab plunged and curvetted through the main gate.

It left her rather flushed and breathless.

“I like Mr. Malcolm,” she confided to herself with a little laugh, “but his manner with women is distinctly brusque! I wonder why!”

The Grand Trunk Road ran to left and right. To the left it led to the bazaar, the cantonment, and the civil lines; to the right, after passing a few houses tenanted by Europeans, it entered the open country on a long stretch of over a thousand miles to Calcutta and the south. In 1857 no thoroughfare in the world equaled the Grand Trunk Road. Beginning at Peshawur, in the extreme north of India, it traversed the Punjab for six hundred miles as far as Aligarh. Here it broke into the Calcutta and Bombay branches, each nearly a thousand miles in length. Wide and straight, well made and tree-lined throughout, it supplied the two great arteries of Indian life. Malcolm had selected it as a training-ground that evening, because he meant to weary and subdue his too highly spirited charger. Whether the pace was fast or slow, Nejdi would be compelled to meet many varieties of traffic, from artillery elephants and snarling camels down to the humble bullock-cart of the ryot. Possibly, he would not shy at such monstrosities after twenty miles of a lathering ride.