London must be the most miserable place on God's Earth on a wet day in January. There were five of us in the Library of The Exiles Club that afternoon. The New Year of 1887 was but a few days old and I had I come to Town from my customary refuge in Cheltenham to meet with my broker and take care of one or two other small items of business. After thirty years in India, the damp always seemed to penetrate my old bones and I was mightily glad of the cheerful fire blazing in the hearth. Perkins, the Club scout, served postprandial burra pegs and retired, leaving our little company to sit a while and indulge in the sort of reminiscence that is such a comfort to old soldiers. As usually happens on such occasions, the talk was desultory at first. Apart from Carstairs, who also resides in Cheltenham, I had not seen any of them for a couple of years and we swapped our limited amounts of news; mostly concerning those of our acquaintance who were no longer with us. I was saddened to learn of Johnny Hulme's passing, he was a capital fellow. Sadly, the malaria got him in the end, it seems.
Talk then turned to the continuing troubles on the North West Frontier and our permanent inability to reach a solution with the Pathans. We reached a consensus that Afghanistan was best left to its own devices except for the fact that the bloody Russians were always interfering where they were not wanted. It really is the most frightful country to fight in and has nothing of any value to the Empire that we could ever see. The only times the local tribesmen ceased from their slaughtering of each other was when they banded together to slaughter us. And Kabul is a most pestilential hole and no place at all for a white man.
I think it was Bradshaw who raised the subject, or it might have been Hadley. They both knew of it and told the story by turns so it is difficult to recall precisely who first mentioned the strange tale of Harry Danvers-Reid. I have to confess that I hardly knew the man. I think I met him once when we were all in Lucknow for cold weather manoeuvres, but it might have been Barrackpore. He made something of a name for himself as a young subaltern during the Sepoy Mutiny, as I recall. He was with one of those irregular outfits, Skinner's or Hodson's Horse, that got renamed as Bengal Lancers when John Company was relieved of any military responsibility. I remember a slender fellow of a little above average height with dark hair and a long pointed nose. Of course, I could be confusing him with Williams-Pike, but that is really by-the-by. Anyway, it turns out that Danvers-Reid was the most singular cove indeed. It appears he went native in the most extreme manner possible.
Now of course, it is well known, but largely passes unremarked in polite company, that a number of old Indian Army hands rather overstepped the mark when it came to embracing the local customs and way of life. I'm not just talking about the odd discreet liaison with a young bibi. Dash it all, a chap has needs and white women were not exactly thick on the ground in the Raj. Some of those native gals were damned attractive, too; and a lot less inhibited about matters physical then your average memsahib! I well remember one dusky little beauty… but that's another story entirely! Which is not to say I condone such behaviour, you understand. Private arrangements are one thing but it doesn't do at all to go the whole hog. I remember one of our young chaps losing his head entirely over some native gal. He proposed marriage! Can you imagine it? The Colonel sorted that one out damned quick, I can tell you. Chap found himself guarding palm trees on the Andaman Islands for the next few years, silly young beggar!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, young Danvers-Reid. I will tell the story just as I heard it even though I allow it is most unsuitable for some ears. Now some may of you may well recall the story of that unscrupulous rogue, James Brooke, the so-called White Rajah of Sarawak. I know it was much discussed out East years back and opinion was sharply divided as to whether the man was a hero or an out-and-out dastard. I was, and still am, most firmly in the latter camp. I don't care if the powers-that-be saw fit to reward the rapacious swine with a knighthood. The damn' man's family run the country to this day. He may have done good work eliminating the odd nest of Malay pirates but he made himself damn rich in the process. Forgive an old man's digression; it was Danvers-Reid we were speaking of.
Sometime towards the end of '67, Harry Danvers-Reid found himself on the eastern frontier near Chittagong. His life, up to this point, was utterly blameless. He did his duty, obeyed his superiors and cared for his men. In short, he was everything a British Officer should be in the Army of India. Why he underwent such a radical change at this point in his life can only be a matter of conjecture. Perhaps his military career stalled somewhat after a promising start and, if the truth is told, he was simply bored. Maybe his sixteen years of campaigning against fractious tribesmen and recalcitrant Rajahs had taken their toll on him. Although he was only a year or two past thirty, he may have felt used-up and stale. I mention this simply to try and shed some light on subsequent events. Dash it all; it wasn't as if the man had displayed any symptoms of going Dhoolali like that chap, Simkins, who wandered into
the Mess as naked as a jaybird, with his private parts painted blue and demanded a chota peg. I mean to say, we could see instantly that something was up with the fellow. If he'd been a horse, we'd have had him shot. No, everyone who knew Danvers-Reid at the time will swear to you he was perfectly normal and generally in high good humour.
The Lancers were patrolling the border and things were generally pretty quiet. The monsoon had broken and the weather turned cooler and, apart from the usual dysentery, they were relatively free from disease. Word came in from one of the little independent hill kingdoms, by name of Nambhustan, that there was a large band of dacoits terrorising the area. The local Nizzam beseeched the Commissioner for some British troops to see the blighters off and Danvers-Reid was sent with a half-troop to restore order. He was still a captain at the time; no one of field rank had obligingly succumbed to the cholera for a few years, so there were no vacant majorities, assuming he'd had the wherewithal to buy one, of course. Bradshaw, who was in the same regiment, said Danvers-Reid was quite bucked by the mission: a chance for some proper soldiering after the months of boredom.
He set out with thirty or so lancers and a young cornet, whose name escapes me for the present. Now let me tell you that those native cavalry were damn' good at their job. The sowars were mostly Sikhs or Rajputs; big fierce chaps with fire in their bellies and they knew how to handle those pig-stickers they carried. Eight feet of steel-shod bamboo is not to be sneezed at, not in the hands of an expert. They headed up into the hills and spent the next few days patrolling and searching for any sign of the dacoits. They had a minor skirmish with a band of the swine up near Nambhupore, the capital, and put them to flight. That sort are very brave when faced with unarmed villagers but it's a wholly different story when it comes to a proper fight. They won't stand, sir, they won't stand.
Clearly, young Harry had acquitted himself well enough and the Nizzam was suitably impressed. A lot of these minor Indian princes are not much to write home about, if I'm frank. Oh yes, there are a few that run things well but there are just as many that exploit their people horribly and are most abominably cruel. Can't say I know too much about Nambhustan but, by all accounts, the Nizzam was of the more enlightened sort. He rewarded Danvers-Reid with the usual bucket of rubies and the pick of his stables, so at least the beggar was properly grateful. That should have been the end of the matter, but it was not. For reasons best known to himself, Danvers-Reid accepted a position as chief of the Nambhustan Army and sent his papers in. The bloody fool didn't even bother to do it in person but handed a letter to the cornet to deliver to the Colonel on his return. The cornet duly brought it with him when the Lancers came back to the lines. That was the last anybody heard from Danvers-Reid for a while.
A couple or three years later, the local Commissioner chanced to have cause to go up to Nambhupore. The old Nizzam was dead and Danvers-Reid was now King Harry I of Nambhustan. That little piece of news stopped the old boy in his tracks. He scuttled back to Chittagong and yelled blue murder. The Viceroy's staff shuffled their feet a bit and eventually decided they couldn't intervene. They dispatched a British officer – by chance my chum Hadley – to go and find out what the Dickens was going on. Dancers-Reid left him kicking his heels for a few days in the guest bungalow and then granted him a ‘Royal Audience.' Hadley was shocked to the core by what he found. Danvers-Reid had gone completely native. He was wearing some sort of local getup and a turban with a diamond the size of a goose egg. Apparently the chap was also surrounded by his harem of forty or so young, ahem, ‘ladies,' who were wearing pyjamas so thin that they might just as well have not bothered. The air reeked of hashish or bhang, as the locals call it and the whole scene reminded Hadley of the worst excesses of Gomorrah.
