English fiction -- 20th century; English poetry; Short stories, English
If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the
novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate.
He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses
his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital
for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal
nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place was full of
schoolboys--sons of Anglo-Indians whom the Infant had collected for the
holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper's heart.
But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I
fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that
the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet
terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.
Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a
native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks are coming for
to-night-with their boy.”
“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,” I said. “Is
he in the Service?”
“No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate. He's
Assistant-Commissioner at Dupé--wherever that is. Somaliland, ain't it,
Stalky?” asked the Infant.
Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You're only three thousand
miles out. Look at the atlas.”
“Anyhow, he's as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,” said the
Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he's bringing a native servant
with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable
room.”
“Why? Is he a Yao--like the fellow Wade brought here--when your
housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some
odd things.
“No. He's one of old Strickland's Punjabi policemen--and quite
European--I believe.”
“Hooray! Haven't talked Punjabi for three months--and a Punjabi from
Central Africa ought to be amusin'.”
We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was
Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.
He is devoted, in a fat man's placid way, to at least eight designing
women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and
when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.
“You didn't send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might have taken a
chill.”
“It's quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front?”
“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother's smile, and we
were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the
shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.
“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to me. “There
was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie
centuries since.”
“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who
came to attention on the marble floor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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