No More Learning

Then it all came out; and at the end of Hannasyde's lucid explanation,
Mrs. Haggert said, with the least little touch of scorn in her
voice:--"So I'm to act as the lay-figure for you to hang the rags of
your tattered affections on, am I? "

Hannasyde didn't see what answer was required, and he devoted himself
generally and vaguely to the praise of Alice Chisane, which was
unsatisfactory. Now it is to be thoroughly made clear that Mrs. Haggert
had not the shadow of a ghost of an interest in Hannasyde.

Only--only no woman likes being made love through instead of
to--specially on behalf of a musty divinity of four years' standing.

Hannasyde did not see that he had made any very particular exhibition
of himself. He was glad to find a sympathetic soul in the arid wastes of
Simla.

When the season ended, Hannasyde went down to his own place and Mrs.
Haggert to hers. "It was like making love to a ghost," said Hannasyde
to himself, "and it doesn't matter; and now I'll get to my work. " But
he found himself thinking steadily of the Haggert-Chisane ghost; and he
could not be certain whether it was Haggert or Chisane that made up the
greater part of the pretty phantom. . . . . . . . . .

He got understanding a month later.

A peculiar point of this peculiar country is the way in which a
heartless Government transfers men from one end of the Empire to the
other. You can never be sure of getting rid of a friend or an enemy till
he or she dies. There was a case once--but that's another story.

Haggert's Department ordered him up from Dindigul to the Frontier at
two days' notice, and he went through, losing money at every step, from
Dindigul to his station. He dropped Mrs. Haggert at Lucknow, to stay
with some friends there, to take part in a big ball at the Chutter
Munzil, and to come on when he had made the new home a little
comfortable. Lucknow was Hannasyde's station, and Mrs. Haggert stayed
a week there. Hannasyde went to meet her. And the train came in,
he discovered which he had been thinking of for the past month. The
unwisdom of his conduct also struck him. The Lucknow week, with two
dances, and an unlimited quantity of rides together, clinched matters;
and Hannasyde found himself pacing this circle of thought:--He
adored Alice Chisane--at least he HAD adored her. AND he admired
Mrs. Landys-Haggert because she was like Alice Chisane. BUT Mrs.
Landys-Haggert was not in the least like Alice Chisane, being a thousand
times more adorable. NOW Alice Chisane was "the bride of another," and
so was Mrs. Landys-Haggert, and a good and honest wife too. THEREFORE,
he, Hannasyde, was. . . . here he called himself several hard names,
and wished that he had been wise in the beginning.

Whether Mrs. Landys-Haggert saw what was going on in his mind, she alone
knows. He seemed to take an unqualified interest in everything connected
with herself, as distinguished from the Alice-Chisane likeness, and he
said one or two things which, if Alice Chisane had been still betrothed
to him, could scarcely have been excused, even on the grounds of the
likeness. But Mrs. Haggert turned the remarks aside, and spent a long
time in making Hannasyde see what a comfort and a pleasure she had been
to him because of her strange resemblance to his old love. Hannasyde
groaned in his saddle and said, "Yes, indeed," and busied himself with
preparations for her departure to the Frontier, feeling very small and
miserable.

The last day of her stay at Lucknow came, and Hannasyde saw her off
at the Railway Station. She was very grateful for his kindness and the
trouble he had taken, and smiled pleasantly and sympathetically as one
who knew the Alice-Chisane reason of that kindness. And Hannasyde abused
the coolies with the luggage, and hustled the people on the platform,
and prayed that the roof might fall in and slay him.

As the train went out slowly, Mrs. Landys-Haggert leaned out of the
window to say goodbye:--"On second thoughts au revoir, Mr. Hannasyde. I
go Home in the Spring, and perhaps I may meet you in Town. "

Hannasyde shook hands, and said very earnestly and adoringly:--"I hope
to Heaven I shall never see your face again! "

And Mrs. Haggert understood.




WRESSLEY OF THE FOREIGN OFFICE.

I closed and drew for my love's sake,
That now is false to me,
And I slew the Riever of Tarrant Moss,
And set Dumeny free.

And ever they give me praise and gold,
And ever I moan my loss,
For I struck the blow for my false love's sake,
And not for the men at the Moss.
--Tarrant Moss.

One of the many curses of our life out here is the want of atmosphere in
the painter's sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand
out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to
scale them against. They do their work, and grow to think that there is
nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are
the real pivots on which the administration turns. Here is an instance
of this feeling. A half-caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He
said to me:--"Do you know what would happen if I added or took away one
single line on this sheet? " Then, with the air of a conspirator:--"It
would disorganize the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the
whole of the Presidency Circle! Think of that? "

If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own
particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill
themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the
listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.

Even the Secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an
over-driven Executive Officer to take census of wheat-weevils through a
district of five thousand square miles.

There was a man once in the Foreign Office--a man who had grown
middle-aged in the department, and was commonly said, by irreverent
juniors, to be able to repeat Aitchison's "Treaties and Sunnuds"
backwards, in his sleep. What he did with his stored knowledge only the
Secretary knew; and he, naturally, would not publish the news abroad.
This man's name was Wressley, and it was the Shibboleth, in those days,
to say:--"Wressley knows more about the Central Indian States than any
living man. " If you did not say this, you were considered one of mean
understanding.

Now-a-days, the man who says that he knows the ravel of the inter-tribal
complications across the Border is of more use; but in Wressley's time,
much attention was paid to the Central Indian States. They were called
"foci" and "factors," and all manner of imposing names.

And here the curse of Anglo-Indian life fell heavily. When Wressley
lifted up his voice, and spoke about such-and-such a succession to
such-and-such a throne, the Foreign Office were silent, and Heads
of Departments repeated the last two or three words of Wressley's
sentences, and tacked "yes, yes," on them, and knew that they were
"assisting the Empire to grapple with seriouspolitical contingencies. "
In most big undertakings, one or two men do the work while the rest sit
near and talk till the ripe decorations begin to fall.

Wressley was the working-member of the Foreign Office firm, and, to keep
him up to his duties when he showed signs of flagging, he was made much
of by his superiors and told what a fine fellow he was.

He did not require coaxing, because he was of tough build, but what
he received confirmed him in the belief that there was no one quite
so absolutely and imperatively necessary to the stability of India as
Wressley of the Foreign Office. There might be other good men, but the
known, honored and trusted man among men was Wressley of the Foreign
Office. We had a Viceroy in those days who knew exactly when to "gentle"
a fractious big man and to hearten up a collar-galled little one, and so
keep all his team level. He conveyed to Wressley the impression which I
have just set down; and even tough men are apt to be disorganized by a
Viceroy's praise. There was a case once--but that is another story.

All India knew Wressley's name and office--it was in Thacker and Spink's
Directory--but who he was personally, or what he did, or what his
special merits were, not fifty men knew or cared. His work filled all
his time, and he found no leisure to cultivate acquaintances beyond
those of dead Rajput chiefs with Ahir blots in their 'scutcheons.
Wressley would have made a very good Clerk in the Herald's College had
he not been a Bengal Civilian.

Upon a day, between office and office, great trouble came to
Wressley--overwhelmed him, knocked him down, and left him gasping
as though he had been a little school-boy. Without reason, against
prudence, and at a moment's notice, he fell in love with a frivolous,
golden-haired girl who used to tear about Simla Mall on a high, rough
waler, with a blue velvet jockey-cap crammed over her eyes. Her name was
Venner--Tillie Venner--and she was delightful.

She took Wressley's heart at a hand-gallop, and Wressley found that it
was not good for man to live alone; even with half the Foreign Office
Records in his presses.

Then Simla laughed, for Wressley in love was slightly ridiculous.

He did his best to interest the girl in himself--that is to say,
his work--and she, after the manner of women, did her best to appear
interested in what, behind his back, she called "Mr. Wressley's Wajahs";
for she lisped very prettily. She did not understand one little thing
about them, but she acted as if she did. Men have married on that sort
of error before now.

Providence, however, had care of Wressley. He was immensely struck with
Miss Venner's intelligence. He would have been more impressed had
he heard her private and confidential accounts of his calls. He held
peculiar notions as to the wooing of girls. He said that the best work
of a man's career should be laid reverently at their feet.

Ruskin writes something like this somewhere, I think; but in ordinary
life a few kisses are better and save time.

About a month after he had lost his heart to Miss Venner, and had been
doing his work vilely in consequence, the first idea of his "Native Rule
in Central India" struck Wressley and filled him with joy. It was, as he
sketched it, a great thing--the work of his life--a really comprehensive
survey of a most fascinating subject--to be written with all the special
and laboriously acquired knowledge of Wressley of the Foreign Office--a
gift fit for an Empress.

He told Miss Venner that he was going to take leave, and hoped, on his
return, to bring her a present worthy of her acceptance. Would she wait?
Certainly she would. Wressley drew seventeen hundred rupees a month. She
would wait a year for that. Her mamma would help her to wait.

So Wressley took one year's leave and all the available documents, about
a truck-load, that he could lay hands on, and went down to Central India
with his notion hot in his head. He began his book in the land he was
writing of. Too much official correspondence had made him a frigid
workman, and he must have guessed that he needed the white light of
local color on his palette. This is a dangerous paint for amateurs to
play with.

Heavens, how that man worked! He caught his Rajahs, analyzed his Rajahs,
and traced them up into the mists of Time and beyond, with their
queens and their concubines. He dated and cross-dated, pedigreed and
triple-pedigreed, compared, noted, connoted, wove, strung, sorted,
selected, inferred, calendared and counter-calendared for ten hours a
day. And, because this sudden and new light of Love was upon him, he
turned those dry bones of history and dirty records of misdeeds into
things to weep or to laugh over as he pleased. His heart and soul were
at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink. He was dowered with
sympathy, insight, humor and style for two hundred and thirty days and
nights; and his book was a Book. He had his vast special knowledge with
him, so to speak; but the spirit, the woven-in human Touch, the poetry
and the power of the output, were beyond all special knowledge. But I
doubt whether he knew the gift that was in him then, and thus he may
have lost some happiness. He was toiling for Tillie Venner, not for
himself.

Men often do their best work blind, for some one else's sake.

Also, though this has nothing to do with the story, in India where every
one knows every one else, you can watch men being driven, by the women
who govern them, out of the rank-and-file and sent to take up points
alone. A good man once started, goes forward; but an average man, so
soon as the woman loses interest in his success as a tribute to her
power, comes back to the battalion and is no more heard of.

Wressley bore the first copy of his book to Simla and, blushing and
stammering, presented it to Miss Venner. She read a little of it.

I give her review verbatim:--"Oh, your book? It's all about those
how-wid Wajahs. I didn't understand it. ". . . . . . . . .

Wressley of the Foreign Office was broken, smashed,--I am not
exaggerating--by this one frivolous little girl. All that he could say
feebly was:--"But, but it's my magnum opus! The work of my life. " Miss
Venner did not know what magnum opus meant; but she knew that Captain
Kerrington had won three races at the last Gymkhana. Wressley didn't
press her to wait for him any longer. He had sense enough for that.

Then came the reaction after the year's strain, and Wressley went back
to the Foreign Office and his "Wajahs," a compiling, gazetteering,
report-writing hack, who would have been dear at three hundred rupees
a month. He abided by Miss Venner's review. Which proves that the
inspiration in the book was purely temporary and unconnected with
himself. Nevertheless, he had no right to sink, in a hill-tarn, five
packing-cases, brought up at enormous expense from Bombay, of the best
book of Indian history ever written.

When he sold off before retiring, some years later, I was turning over
his shelves, and came across the only existing copy of "Native Rule in
Central India"--the copy that Miss Venner could not understand. I read
it, sitting on his mule-trucks, as long as the light lasted, and offered
him his own price for it. He looked over my shoulder for a few pages and
said to himself drearily:--"Now, how in the world did I come to write
such damned good stuff as that? " Then to me:--"Take it and keep
it. Write one of your penny-farthing yarns about its birth.
Perhaps--perhaps--the whole business may have been ordained to that
end. "

Which, knowing what Wressley of the Foreign Office was once, struck me
as about the bitterest thing that I had ever heard a man say of his own
work.




BY WORD OF MOUTH.

Not though you die tonight, O Sweet, and wail,
A spectre at my door,
Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail--
I shall but love you more,
Who from Death's house returning, give me still
One moment's comfort in my matchless ill.
--Shadow Houses.

This tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and
where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough
in this country to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only
write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him "Dormouse,"
because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good
Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy
Commissioner, who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse.
He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was
a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of "Squash" Hillardyce of the Berars, who
married his Chief's daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is
nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years.
This is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one
another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption--just
as the Dormice did. These two little people retired from the world after
their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course,
to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends hereby, and the
Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally,
that Dormouse was the best of good fellows, though dull. A Civil Surgeon
who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere--least of all
in India, where we are few in the land, and very much dependent on each
other's kind offices. Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the
world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of
typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and
his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted
before he realized that Mrs. Dumoise was burning with something worse
than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call
on Mrs. Shute, the Engineer's wife, and timidly speak about his trouble.
Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless
in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses,
minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs. Shute almost boxed Dumoise's
ears for what she called his "criminal delay," and went off at once to
look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station
that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five
cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did
their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned
to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those
typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of
the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were
going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs. Dumoise
got a relapse and died in a week and the Station went to the funeral.
Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be
taken away.

After the death, Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be
comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should
go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so. Dumoise
was very thankful for the suggestion--he was thankful for anything in
those days--and went to Chini on a walking-tour.

Chini is some twenty marches from Simla, in the heart of the Hills, and
the scenery is good if you are in trouble.
You pass through big,
still deodar-forests, and under big, still cliffs, and over big, still
grass-downs swelling like a woman's breasts; and the wind across the
grass, and the rain among the deodars says:--"Hush--hush--hush. " So
little Dumoise was packed off to Chini, to wear down his grief with a
full-plate camera, and a rifle. He took also a useless bearer, because
the man had been his wife's favorite servant. He was idle and a thief,
but Dumoise trusted everything to him.

On his way back from Chini, Dumoise turned aside to Bagi, through the
Forest Reserve which is on the spur of Mount Huttoo. Some men who have
travelled more than a little say that the march from Kotegarh to Bagi is
one of the finest in creation. It runs through dark wet forest, and ends
suddenly in bleak, nipped hill-side and black rocks. Bagi dak-bungalow
is open to all the winds and is bitterly cold. Few people go to Bagi.
Perhaps that was the reason why Dumoise went there. He halted at seven
in the evening, and his bearer went down the hill-side to the village
to engage coolies for the next day's march. The sun had set, and the
night-winds were beginning to croon among the rocks. Dumoise leaned on
the railing of the verandah, waiting for his bearer to return. The man
came back almost immediately after he had disappeared, and at such a
rate that Dumoise fancied he must have crossed a bear. He was running as
hard as he could up the face of the hill.

But there was no bear to account for his terror. He raced to the
verandah and fell down, the blood spurting from his nose and his face
iron-gray. Then he gurgled:--"I have seen the Memsahib! I have seen the
Memsahib! "

"Where? " said Dumoise.

"Down there, walking on the road to the village. She was in a blue
dress, and she lifted the veil of her bonnet and said:--'Ram Dass, give
my salaams to the Sahib, and tell him that I shall meet him next month
at Nuddea. ' Then I ran away, because I was afraid. "

What Dumoise said or did I do not know. Ram Dass declares that he said
nothing, but walked up and down the verandah all the cold night, waiting
for the Memsahib to come up the hill and stretching out his arms into
the dark like a madman. But no Memsahib came, and, next day, he went on
to Simla cross-questioning the bearer every hour.

Ram Dass could only say that he had met Mrs. Dumoise and that she had
lifted up her veil and given him the message which he had faithfully
repeated to Dumoise. To this statement Ram Dass adhered.

He did not know where Nuddea was, had no friends at Nuddea, and would
most certainly never go to Nuddea; even though his pay were doubled.

Nuddea is in Bengal, and has nothing whatever to do with a doctor
serving in the Punjab. It must be more than twelve hundred miles from
Meridki.

Dumoise went through Simla without halting, and returned to Meridki
there to take over charge from the man who had been officiating for him
during his tour. There were some Dispensary accounts to be explained,
and some recent orders of the Surgeon-General to be noted, and,
altogether, the taking-over was a full day's work. In the evening,
Dumoise told his locum tenens, who was an old friend of his bachelor
days, what had happened at Bagi; and the man said that Ram Dass might as
well have chosen Tuticorin while he was about it.

At that moment a telegraph-peon came in with a telegram from Simla,
ordering Dumoise not to take over charge at Meridki, but to go at once
to Nuddea on special duty. There was a nasty outbreak of cholera at
Nuddea, and the Bengal Government, being shorthanded, as usual, had
borrowed a Surgeon from the Punjab.

Dumoise threw the telegram across the table and said:--"Well? "

The other Doctor said nothing. It was all that he could say.

Then he remembered that Dumoise had passed through Simla on his way
from Bagi; and thus might, possibly, have heard the first news of the
impending transfer.

He tried to put the question, and the implied suspicion into words, but
Dumoise stopped him with:--"If I had desired THAT, I should never have
come back from Chini. I was shooting there. I wish to live, for I have
things to do. . . . but I shall not be sorry. "

The other man bowed his head, and helped, in the twilight, to pack up
Dumoise's just opened trunks. Ram Dass entered with the lamps.

"Where is the Sahib going? " he asked.

"To Nuddea," said Dumoise, softly.

Ram Dass clawed Dumoise's knees and boots and begged him not to go.

Ram Dass wept and howled till he was turned out of the room. Then he
wrapped up all his belongings and came back to ask for a character.
He was not going to Nuddea to see his Sahib die, and, perhaps to die
himself.

So Dumoise gave the man his wages and went down to Nuddea alone; the
other Doctor bidding him goodbye as one under sentence of death.

Eleven days later, he had joined his Memsahib; and the Bengal Government
had to borrow a fresh Doctor to cope with that epidemic at Nuddea. The
first importation lay dead in Chooadanga Dak-Bungalow.




TO BE HELD FOR REFERENCE.

By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in the Sun,
Fell the Stone To the Tarn where the daylight is lost;
So She fell from the light of the Sun,
And alone.

Now the fall was ordained from the first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the Tarn,
And alone.

Oh, Thou who has builded the world,
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou The Sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now--even now--even now!
--From the Unpublished Papers of McIntosh Jellaludin.

"Say, is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower,
Thou whom I long for, who longest for me?
Oh be it night--be it--"

Here he fell over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai
where the horse-traders and the best of the blackguards from Central
Asia live; and, because he was very drunk indeed and the night was dark,
he could not rise again till I helped him. That was the beginning of my
acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin. When a loafer, and drunk, sings
The Song of the Bower, he must be worth cultivating. He got off the
camel's back and said, rather thickly:--"I--I--I'm a bit screwed, but a
dip in Loggerhead will put me right again; and I say, have you spoken to
Symonds about the mare's knees? "

Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from us, close to
Mesopotamia, where you mustn't fish and poaching is impossible, and
Charley Symonds' stable a half mile further across the paddocks. It was
strange to hear all the old names, on a May night, among the horses
and camels of the Sultan Caravanserai. Then the man seemed to remember
himself and sober down at the same time. He leaned against the camel and
pointed to a corner of the Serai where a lamp was burning:--

"I live there," said he, "and I should be extremely obliged if you would
be good enough to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more than
usually drunk--most--most phenomenally tight. But not in respect to my
head. 'My brain cries out against'--how does it go? But my head rides on
the--rolls on the dung-hill I should have said, and controls the qualm. "

I helped him through the gangs of tethered horses and he collapsed on
the edge of the verandah in front of the line of native quarters.

"Thanks--a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To think
that a man should so shamelessly. . . . Infamous liquor, too. Ovid in
exile drank no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas! I had no ice. Good
night. I would introduce you to my wife were I sober--or she civilized. "

A native woman came out of the darkness of the room, and began calling
the man names; so I went away. He was the most interesting loafer that
I had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later on, he became
a friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man fearfully shaken
with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the thirty-five which, he
said, was his real age. When a man begins to sink in India, and is not
sent Home by his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low from a
respectable point of view. By the time that he changes his creed, as did
McIntosh, he is past redemption.

In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs,
generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live
more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to know
them. As McIntosh himself used to say:--"If I change my religion for my
stomach's sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am
I anxious for notoriety. "

At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me. "Remember this. I am
not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your food,
nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting
drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the
bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books
which you may not specially value. It is more than likely that I shall
sell them for bottles of excessively filthy country-liquors. In return,
you shall share such hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy
on which two can sit, and it is possible that there may, from time to
time, be food in that platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on
the premises at any hour: and thus I make you welcome to all my poor
establishments. "

I was admitted to the McIntosh household--I and my good tobacco.

But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by
day. Friends buying horses would not understand it.

Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed
at this, and said simply:--"You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed
a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done
exactly the same thing, Good Heavens! I was once"--he spoke as though
he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment--"an Oxford Man! " This
accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds' stable.

"You," said McIntosh, slowly, "have not had that advantage; but, to
outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong
drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet
I am not certain. You are--forgive my saying so even while I am smoking
your excellent tobacco--painfully ignorant of many things. "

We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned
no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the
native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronized by a
loafer, but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one
very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags.
He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially:--"All things
considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to
your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating
quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately
under your notice. That for instance. "--He pointed to a woman cleaning
a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the
water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.

"There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she
was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the
Spanish Monk meant when he said--

'I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp. --'

and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs.
McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of
the people of the country--of whom, by the way, you know nothing. "

The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong.
The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten.

McIntosh Jellaludin apologized, saying:--

"It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and
she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I fore-gathered
with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me
ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in
cookery. "

He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was
not pretty to look at.

McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall.

He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather
more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a
week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him
while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began
reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating
time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of
his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag
of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told
me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had
descended--a Virgil in the Shades, he said--and that, in return for
my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new
Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a
horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.

"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you
of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but I make no
doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage. "

"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said.

"I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have
no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you
have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe
me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme. "

He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--

"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing good
and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not? "

When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in
a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his
hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.

"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations! "

"Have you so many, then, McIntosh? "

"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and
literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which
reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the
Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has
it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee--but still
infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs.
McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass,
which I have built up in the seven years of my degradation. "

He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water.

He was very shaky and sick.

He referred several times to his "treasure"--some great possession that
he owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and
as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough
about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent,
to make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at
Strickland as an ignorant man--"ignorant West and East"--he said. His
boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts,
which may or may not have been true--I did not know enough to check his
statements--and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native
life"--which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he
was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir--as
McIntosh Jellaludin--he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked
several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things
worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the
cold weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin
alpaca-coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he
would die rationally, like a man.

As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death
sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.

The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped
in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over
him. He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes
were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me so foully
that the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and
calmed down.