The Broken Road. A. E. W. Mason

was strangely silent. The people whom he passed either spoke not at all or spoke only in low tones. They sat huddled in groups, waiting. Fear was abroad that morning. It was known that the brain of the defence was dying. It was known, too, what cruel fate awaited those within the Fort, if those without ever forced the gates and burst in upon their victims.

      Dewes found the Political Officer propped up on pillows on his camp-bed. The door from the courtyard was open, and the morning light poured brightly into the room.

      "Sit here, close to me, Dewes," said Luffe in a whisper, "and listen, for I am very tired." A smile came upon his face. "Do you remember Linforth's letters? How that phrase came again and again: 'I am very tired.'"

      The Doctor arranged the pillows underneath his shoulders, and then

       Luffe said:

      "All right. I shall do now."

      He waited until the Doctor had gone from the room and continued:

      "I am not going to talk to you about the Fort. The defence is safe in your hands, so long as defence is possible. Besides, if it falls it's not a great thing. The troops will come up and trample down Wafadar Nazim and Abdulla Mahommed. They are not the danger. The road will go on again, even though Linforth's dead. No, the man whom I am afraid of is—the son of the Khan."

      Dewes stared, and then said in a soothing voice:

      "He will be looked after."

      "You think my mind's wandering," continued Luffe. "It never was clearer in my life. The Khan's son is a boy a week old. Nevertheless I tell you that boy is the danger in Chiltistan. The father—we know him. A good fellow who has lost all the confidence of his people. There is hardly an adherent of his who genuinely likes him; there's hardly a man in this Fort who doesn't believe that he wished to sell his country to the British. I should think he is impossible here in the future. And everyone in Government House knows it. We shall do the usual thing, I have no doubt—pension him off, settle him down comfortably outside the borders of Chiltistan, and rule the country as trustee for his son—until the son comes of age."

      Dewes realised surely enough that Luffe was in possession of his faculties, but he thought his anxiety exaggerated.

      "You are looking rather far ahead, aren't you, sir?" he asked.

      Luffe smiled.

      "Twenty-one years. What are twenty-one years to India? My dear Dewes!"

      He was silent. It seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as a long span of time. But there was no one else to whom he could confide his fears. If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all that there was.

      "I wish I was going to live," he cried in a low voice of exasperation. "I wish I could last just long enough to travel down to Calcutta and make them listen to me. But there's no hope of it. You must do what you can, Dewes, but very likely they won't pay any attention to you. Very likely you'll believe me wrong yourself, eh? Poor old Luffe, a man with a bee in his bonnet, eh?" he whispered savagely.

      "No, sir," replied Dewes. "You know the Frontier. I know that."

      "And even there you are wrong. No man knows the Frontier. We are all stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and their cut-throat ways. The most that you can know is that you are stumbling in the dark. Well, let's get back to the boy here. This country will be kept for him, for twenty-one years. Where is he going to be during those twenty-one years?"

      Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the

       Political Officer.

      "Why, sir, the Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and

       Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn—" and Major Dewes

       stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political

       Officer's face.

      "I think you are all mad," said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his bed and cried with vehemence, "You take these boys to England. You train them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to Eastern ideas, and you think all is well. I tell you, Dewes, it's sheer lunacy. Of course it's true—this boy won't perhaps suffer in esteem among his people quite as much as others have done. He belongs and his people belong to the Maulai sect. The laws of religion are not strict among them. They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose caste so easily. But you have to look at the man as he will be, the hybrid mixture of East and West."

      He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry, and for a little while he was silent. Then he began again, but this time in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes' memory for many years to come. Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken on any subject with so much wistfulness.

      "Listen to me, Dewes. I have lived for the Frontier. I have had no other interest, almost no other ties. I am not a man of friends. I believed at one time Linforth was my friend. I believed I liked him very much. But I think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier. The Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting passion. And I am very well content that it has been so. I don't regret missed opportunities of happiness. What I regret is that I shall not be alive in twenty-one years to avert the danger I foresee, or to laugh at my fears if I am wrong. They can do what they like in Rajputana and Bengal and Bombay. But on the Frontier I want things to go well. Oh, how I want them to go well!"

      Luffe had grown very pale, and the sweat glistened upon his forehead. Dewes held to his lips a glass of brandy which stood upon a table beside the bed.

      "What danger do you foresee?" asked Dewes. "I will remember what you say."

      "Yes, remember it; write it out, so that you may remember it, and din it into their ears at Government House," said Luffe. "You take these boys, you give them Oxford, a season in London—did you ever have a season in London when you were twenty-one, Dewes? You show them Paris. You give them opportunities of enjoyment, such as no other age, no other place affords—has ever afforded. You give them, for a short while, a life of colour, of swift crowding hours of pleasure, and then you send them back—to settle down in their native States, and obey the orders of the Resident. Do you think they will be content? Do you think they will have their heart in their work, in their humdrum life, in their elaborate ceremonies? Oh, there are instances enough to convince if only people would listen. There's a youth now in the South, the heir of an Indian throne—he has six weeks' holiday. How does he use it, do you think? He travels hard to England, spends a week there, and travels back again. In England he is treated as an equal; here, in spite of his ceremonies, he is an inferior, and will and must be so. The best you can hope is that he will be merely unhappy. You pray that he won't take to drink and make his friends among the jockeys and the trainers. He has lost the taste for the native life, and nevertheless he has got to live it. Besides—besides—I haven't told you the worst of it."

      Dewes leaned forward. The sincerity of Luffe had gained upon him. "Let me hear all," he said.

      "There is the white woman," continued Luffe. "The English woman, the English girl, with her daintiness, her pretty frocks, her good looks, her delicate charm. Very likely she only thinks of him as a picturesque figure; she dances with him, but she does not take him seriously. Yes, but he may take her seriously, and often does. What then? When he is told to go back to his State and settle down, what then? Will he be content with a wife of his own people? He is already a stranger among his own folk. He will eat out his heart with bitterness and jealousy. And, mind you, I am speaking of the best—the best of the Princes and the best of the English women. What of the others? The English women who take his pearls, and the Princes who come back and boast of their success. Do you think that is good for British rule in India? Give me something to drink!"

      Luffe poured out his vehement convictions to his companion, wishing