§ 4. MR. AND MRS. CORNELIUS GOSLING-GREEN.
It was Sunday—and therefore John Bruce, the Engineering College Professor, was exceptionally busy. On a-week-day he only had to deliver his carefully prepared lectures, interview students, read and return essays, take the chair at meetings of college societies, coach one or two "specialists," superintend the games on the college gymkhana ground, interview seekers after truth and perverters of the same, write letters on various matters of college business, visit the hostel, set question papers and correct answers, attend common-room meetings, write articles for the college magazine and papers for the Scientific, Philosophical, Shakespearean, Mathematical, Debating, Literary, Historical, Students', Old Boys', or some other "union" and, if God willed, get a little exercise and private study at his beloved "subject" and invention, before preparing for the morrow.
On Sundays, the thousand and one things crowded out of the programme were to be cleared up, his home mail was to be written, and then arrears of work had to be attacked.
At four o'clock he addressed Roy Pittenweem and Mrs. MacDougall, his dogs, and said:—
"There's a bloomin' bun-snatch somewhere, you fellers, don't it?". Though a Professor and one of the most keen and earnest workmen in India, his own college blazers were not quite worn out, and Life, the great Artist, had not yet done much sketching on the canvas of his face—in spite of his daily contact with the Science Professor, William Greatorex Bonnett, B.A., widely known as the Mad Hatter, the greatest of whose many great achievements is his avoidance of death at the hands of his colleagues and acquaintance.
Receiving no reply beyond a wink and a waggle, he dropped his blue pencil, rose, and went to the table sacred to litter; and from a wild welter of books, pipes, papers, golf-balls, hats, cigar-boxes, dog-collars, switches, cartridges and other sediment, he extracted a large gilt-edged card and studied it without enthusiasm or bias.
"Large coat of arms," he murmured—"patience—no—a pay-sheet on a monument asking for time; item a hand, recently washed; ditto, a dickey bird—possibly pigeon plucked proper or gull argent; guinea-pig regardant and expectant; supporters, two bottliwallahs rampant. Crest, a bum-boat flottant, and motto 'Cinq-cento-percentum'. All done in gold. Likewise in gold and deboshed gothic, the legend 'Sir and Lady Fuggilal Potipharpar, At Home. To meet Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Gosling-Green, M.P. Five p.m. C.T.' … Now what the devil, Roy Pittenweem, is C.T.? Is it 'Curious Time' or 'Cut for Trumps' or a new decoration for gutter plutocrats? It might mean 'Calcutta Time,' mightn't it, as the egregious Phossy and his gang would have it? Well, we'll go and look upon the Cornmealious Gosling-Green, M.P.'s, and chasten our soul from sinful pride—ain't it, Mrs. MacDougall?" and the Professor strolled across to the Sports Club for a cup of tea.
In the midst of cheery converse with a non-moral and unphilosophic Professor of Moral Philosophy, a fat youth of the name of Augustus Grobble whose life was one long picturesque pose, he sprang to his feet, remarking: "I go, Augustus, I am bidden to behold some prize Gosling-Greens or something, at 5 p.m., D.V. or D.T. or C.T. or L.S.D. or otherwise. Perhaps it was S.T. which means 'Standard Time,' and as I said, I go, Augustus."
Augustus Grobble was understood to return thanks piously….
"Taxi, Sahib?" inquired the messenger-boy at the door.
"Go to," said the Professor. "Also go call me a tikka-gharri[55] and select a very senior horse, blind, angular, withered, wilted, and answering to the name, most obviously, of Skin-and-Grief—lest I be taken by the Grizzly-Goslings for a down-trodden plutocrat and a brother—and not seen for the fierce and 'aughty oppressor that I am."
[55] Public conveyance.
"Sahib?"
"Tikka-gharri lao,[56] you lazy little 'ound! Don't I speak plain English?" The Professor made it a practice to "rot" when not working—hoping thus even in India to retain sanity and the broad and wholesome outlook, for he was a very short-tempered person, easily roused to dangerous wrath.
[56] Bring.
A carriage, upholding a pony who, in return, spasmodically moved the carriage which gave evidence of having been where moths break through and steal, lumbered into the Club garden, and the Professor, imploring the jehu not to let the pony "die on him" in the Hibernian sense of the expression, gingerly entered.
"Convey me to the gilded Potipharparian 'alls, Arthur," said he.
"Sahib?"
"Why don't you listen? Palangur Hill ki pas[57] And don't forget you've to get me there at 5 p.m. C.T. or S.T.—I leave it to you, partner."
[57] To.
On arrival, the Professor concluded that if he had arrived at 5 p.m. C.T. he ought to have come at 5 p.m. S.T., or vice versa; as what he termed 'the show' was evidently about over. Fortune favours all sorts of people.
His hostess, who looked as though she had come straight out of the Bible via Bond Street, and his host, who looked as though he had never come out of Petticoat Lane at all, both accused him of being unable to work out the problem of "Find Calcutta Time given the Standard Time," and he professed to be proud to be able to acknowledge the truth of the compliment.
"Come and be presented to Meester and Meesers Carneelius Garsling-Green,
M.P.," said the lady, waddling before him; and her husband echoed:—
"Oah, yess. Come and be presented to Meester and Meesers
Garsling-Green," waddling after him.
Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, M.P., proved to be a tall, drooping, melancholy creature, with "Dundreary" whiskers, reach-me-down suit of thick cloth, wrong kind of tie, thickish boots, and no presence. Without "form" and void.
Mrs. Cornelius Gosling-Green was a Severe Person, tiny, hard-featured and even more garrulous than her husband, who watched her anxiously and nervously as he answered any question put in her presence….
"And, oh, why, why are not you Mohammedans loyal?" said Mrs. Cornelius Gosling-Green, to a magnificent-looking specimen of the Mussulman of the old school—stately, venerable, courteous and honourable—who stood near, looking as though he wondered what the devil he was doing in that galley.
Turning from his friend, Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan, a fine Pathan, "Loyal, Madam! Loyal! Believe me we Mohammedans are most intensely and devotedly loyal," he replied. "You have indeed been misled. Though you are only spending a month in India for collecting the materials for your book or pamphlet, you must really learn that much. We Mohammedans are as loyal as the English themselves.—More loyal than some in fact," he added, with intent. The Pathan smiled meaningly.
"Ah, that's just it. I mean 'Why aren't you Mohammedans loyal to poor
India?'"
The man turned and left the marquee and the garden without another word.
"Poor bleeding India," corrected the Professor.
"And are you a friend and worker for India?" continued the lady, turning to him and eyeing him with severity.
"I am. I do my humble possible in my obscure capacity, Mrs.
Grisly-Gosling," he replied. "I beg your pardon, Mrs.
Grossly-Grin——that is—er—Gosling-Green, I should say."
Be sure your sins will find you out. Through wilful perversion of the pleasing name the Professor had rendered himself incapable of enunciating it.
"And what do you do for India,—write, speak, organize, subscribe or what?" asked the lady with increasing severity.
"I work."
"In what capacity?"
"I am a professor at the Government Engineering College, here in
Gungapur."
"O-h-h-h-h! You're one of the overpaid idlers who bolster up the
Bureaucracy and batten on the….'"
"Allow me to assure you that I neither bolster, batten, nor bureau, Mrs. Grizzling—I mean Gosling Green. Nor do I talk through my hat. I——" the Professor was beginning to get angry and to lose control.
"Perhaps you are one of us in disguise—a Pro-Native?"
"I am intensely Pro-Native."
The tall Pathan stared at the Professor.
"Oh, good! I beg your pardon! Cornelius, this gentleman is a Government professor and is with us!" said this female of the M.P. species.
"That's right," gushed the Gosling. "We want a few in the enemy's camp both to spy out their weakness and to embarrass them. Now about this University business. I am going to take it up. That history affair now! Scandalous! I cannot tell you what a wave of indignation swept over England when that syllabus was drawn up. Nothing truly Liberal about the whole course, much less Radical. I at once said: 'I will see this righted. I will go to India, and I will beard the….'"
"I think it was I who said it, Cornelius," remarked his much better half, coldly.
"Yes, my dear Superiora, yes. Now with your help I think we can do something, Professor. Good. This is providential. We shall be able to embarrass them now! Will you write me——"
"You are going a little too fast, I think," said the Professor. "I am a 'Pro-Native' and a servant of the Pro-Native Government of India. As such, I don't think I can be of any service to twenty-one-day visitors who wish to 'embarrass' the best friends of my friends the Natives, even supposing I were the sort of gentle Judas you compliment me by imagining me. I——"
"You distinctly say you are Pro-Native and then——"
"I repeat I am intensely Pro-Native, and so are the Viceroy, the Governors, the entire Civil Service, the Educational Service, the Forest Service, the P.W.D., the Medical Service, the Army, and every other Service and Department in India as well as every decent man in India. We are all Pro-Native, and all doing our best in our respective spheres, in spite of a deal of ignorant and officious interference and attempted 'embarrassment' at the hands of the self-seeking, the foolish, the busy-body, the idle—not to mention the vicious. What a charming day it is. I have so enjoyed the honour of meeting you."
* * * * *
"Well, my Scroobious Bird! And have they this day roasted in India such a Gosling as shall never be put out?" inquired the non-moral and unphilosophic Professor of Moral Philosophy, a little later.
"No, my Augustus," was the reply. "It's a quacking little gosling, and won't lead to any great commotion m the farm-yard. Nasty little bird—like a sat-bai or whatever they call those appalling things 'seven-sister' birds, aren't they, that chatter and squeak all day."
"Have a long drink and tell us all about it," replied Mr. Augustus
Clarence Percy Marmaduke Grobble.
"Oh, same old game on the same old stage. Same old players. Leading lady and gent changed only. Huge great hideous bungalow, like a Goanese wedding-cake, in a vast garden of symmetrically arranged blue and red glazed 'art' flower-pots. Lofty room decorated with ancestral portraits done by Mr. Guzzlebhoy Fustomji Paintwallah; green glass chandeliers and big blue and white tin balls; mauve carpet with purple azure roses; wall-paper, bright pink with red lilies and yellow cabbages; immense mouldy mirrors, and a tin alarm clock. Big crowd of all the fly-blown rich knaves of the place who have got more than they want out of Government or else haven't got enough. Only novelty was a splendid Pathan chap, got-up in English except for the conical cap and puggri. Extraordinarily like Ross-Ellison, except that he had long black Pathan hair on his shoulders. Been to England; barrister probably, and seemed the most viciously seditious of the lot. Silly ignorant Goslings in the middle saying to Brahmins, 'And you are Muscleman, aren't you, or are you a Dhobi?' and to Parsis, 'I suppose you High Caste gentlemen have to bathe every day?' shoving their awful ignorance under the noses of everybody, and inquiring after the healths of the 'chief wives'. Silly fatuous geese!—and then talking the wildest piffle about the 'burning question of the hour' and making the seditious rotters groan at their ineptitude and folly, until they cheer them up sudden-like with a bit of dam' treason and sedition they ought to be jailed for. Jailed. I nearly threw a fit when the old geezer, in a blaze of diamonds and glory, brought up old Phossy and presented him to the Gander, and he murmured:—
"'My deah friend,' as Phossy held on to his paw in transports, 'to think of their casting you into jail,' and old Mother Potiphar squeaked: 'Oh, this is not the forger of that name—but the eminent politeecian'. But poor Gosly had thought he had been a political prisoner! Meant no offence. And then some little squirt of an editor primed him with lies about the University and the new syllabus, and straightway the Gander tried to get me on the 'embarrass the Government' lay, and talked as though he knew all about it. 'I'll get some of the ladies of my committee sent out here as History-lecturers at your University,' says he. 'They'll teach pure Liberal History and inculcate true ideas of liberty and self-government.' I wanted to go outside and be ill. Good old 'Paget M.P.'—takes up a 'Question' and writes a silly pamphlet on it and thinks he's said the last word.—Written thousands.—Don't matter so long as he does it in England.—Just the place for him nowadays.—But when he feels he's shoved out of the lime-light by a longer-haired Johnny, it's rough luck that he should try and get back by spending his blooming committee's money coming here and deludin' the poor seditionist and seducin' your Hatter from his allegiance to his salt…. Awful old fraud really—no ability whatever. Came to my college to spout once, in my time. Lord! Still he was a guest, and we let him go. Run by his missus really, I think. Why can't she stop at home and hammer windows? They say she went and asked the Begum of Bhopal to join her in a 'mission and crusade'. Teach the Zenana Woman and Purdah Lady to Come Forth instead of Bring Forth. Come Forth and smash windows. Probably true. Silly Goslings. Drop 'em…. What did you think of our bowling yesterday? With anything like a wicket your College should be…."
* * * * *
Entering his lonely and sequestered bungalow that evening Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed changed his Pathan dress for European dining-kit, removed his beard and wig, and became Mr. Robin Ross-Ellison. After dinner he wrote to the eminent Cold weather Visitor to India, Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, as follows—
"DEAR SIR,
"As I promised this afternoon, when you graciously condescended to honour me with your illuminating conversation, I enclose the papers which I guaranteed would shed some light on certain aspects of Indian conditions, and which I consider likely to give you food for thought.
"As I was myself educated in India, was brought up to maturity with Indian students, and have lived among them in many different places, I may claim to know something about them. As a class they are gentle, affectionate, industrious, well-meaning and highly intelligent. They are the most malleable of human metal, the finest material for the sculptor of humanity, the most impressionable of wax. In the right hands they can be moulded to anything, by the right leader led to any height. And conversely, of them a devil can make fiends. By the wrong leader they can be led down to any depth.
"The crying need of India is noble men to make noble men of these fine impressionable youths. Read the enclosed and take it that the writer (who wrote this recently in Gungapur Jail) is typical of a large class of misled, much-to-be-pitied youths, wrecked and ruined and destroyed—their undoing begun by an unspeakably false and spurious educational ideal, and completed by the writings, and the spoken words of heartless unscrupulous scoundrels who use them to their own vile ends.
"Read, Sir, and realize how truly noble, useful and beautiful is your great work of endeavouring to embarrass our wicked Government, to weaken its prestige here and in England, to encourage its enemies, to increase discontent and unrest, to turn the thoughts of students to matters political, and, in short, to carry on the good work of the usual Self-advertising Visitation M.P.
"Humbly thanking your Honour, and wishing your Honour precisely the successes and rewards that your Honour deserves,
"I remain,
"The dust of your Honour's feet,
"ILDERIM DOST MAHOMMED."
And Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, M.P., read as follows:—
… And so I am to be hanged by the neck till I am dead, am I? And for a murder which I never committed, and in the perpetration of which I had no hands? Is it, my masters? I trow so. But I can afford to spit—for I did commit a murder, nevertheless, a beautiful secret murder that no one could possibly ever bring to my home or cast in my tooth.
"Well, well! Hang me and grin in sleeve—and I will laugh on other side of face while dancing on nothing—for if you think you are doing me in eye, I know I have done you in eye!
"Yes. I murdered Mr. Spensonly, the Chief Secretary of the Nuddee
River Commission.
"As the Latin-and-Greeks used to say, 'Solo fesit'!
"You think Mr. Spensonly died of plague? So he did. And who caused him to have plague? In short, who plagued him? (Ha! Ha! An infinite jest!) You shall know all about it and about, as Omar says, for I am going now to write my autobiography of myself, as all great so-called Criminals have done, for the admiration of mankind and the benefit of posterity. And my fellow-brothers and family-members shall proudly publish it with my photo—that of a great Patriot Hero and second Mazzini, Robespierre, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Wallace, Charlotte Corday, Kosciusko, and Mr. Robert Bruce (of spider fame).
"And I shall welcome death and embrace the headsman ere making last speech and dying confession. Having long desired to know what lies Beyond, I shall make virtue of necessity and seize opportunity (of getting to know) to play hero and die gamish.
"Not like the Pathan murderer who walked about in front of condemned cell with Koran balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! Pooh! and Bah! for all holy men. I give spurnings to them all for fools, knaves, or hypocrites. There are no gods any more for educated gentleman, except himself, and that's very good god to worship and make offering to (Ha! Ha! What a wit will be lost to the silly world when it permits itself to lose me.)
"Well, to return to the sheep, as the European proverb has it. I was born here in Gungapur, which will also have honour of being my death-and-cremation place, of poor but honest parent on thirty rupees a mensem. He was very clever fellow and sent five sons to Primary School, Middle School, High School and Gungapur Government College at cost of over hundred rupees a month, all out of his thirty rupees a mensem. He always used proverb 'Politeness lubricates wheels of life and palm also,' and he obliged any man who made it worth his while. But he fell into bad odours at hands of Mr. Spensonly owing to folly of bribing-fellow sending cash to office and the letter getting into Mr. Spensonly's post-bag and opening by mistake.
"But the Sahib took me up into his office to soften blow to progenitor and that shows he was a bad man or his luck would not have been to take me in and give chance to murder him.
"My good old paternal parent made me work many hours each night, and though he knew nothing of the subjects he could read English and would hear all my lessons and other brothers', and we had to say Skagger Rack, Cattegat, Scaw Fell and Helvellyn, and such things to him, and he would abuse us if we mis-arranged the figures and letters in CaH2O2 and H2SO4 and all those things in bottles. Before the Matriculation Examination he made a Graduate, whom he had got under his thumb-nail, teach us all the answers to all the back questions in all subjects till we knew them all by heart, and also made us learn ten long essays by heart so as to make up the required essay out of parts of them. He nearly killed my brother by starvation (saving food as well as punishing miscreant) for failing—the only one of us who ever failed in any examination—which he did by writing out all first chapter of Washington Irving for essay, when the subject was 'Describe a sunrise in the Australian back-blocks'. As parent said, he could have used 'A moonlight stroll by the sea-shore' and change the colour from silver to golden. But the fool was ill—so ill that he tried to kill himself and had not the strength. He said he would rather go to the missionaries' hell, full of Englishes, than go on learning Egbert, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelwulf, Ethelred, Alfred, Edward the Elder, Edred, Edwy, Edgar, Ethelred the Unready, and If two triangles have two sides of the one equal to two angles of the other each to each and the sides so subtended equal then shall the bases or fourth sides be equal each to each or be isosceles.
"Well, the progenitor kept our noses in the pie night and day and we all hated the old papa piously and wished he and we and all teachers and text-books were burned alive.
"But we were very much loved by everybody as we were so learned and clever, and whenever the Collector or anybody came to School, the Head Master used to put one of us in each room and call on us to answer questions and recite and say capes and bays without the map, and other clever things; and when my eldest brother left I had to change coat with another boy and do it twice sometimes, in different rooms.
"Sometimes the Educational Inspector himself would come, but then nothing could be done, for he would not ask questions that were always asked and were in the book, like the teachers and Deputy Inspectors did, but questions that no one knew and had to be thought out then and there. That is no test of Learning—and any fool who has not troubled to mug his book by heart might be able to answer such questions, while the man who had learnt every letter sat dumb.
"I hated the school and the books I knew by heart, but I loved Mr. Ganeshram Joshibhai. He was a clever cunning man, and could always tweak the leg of pompous Head Master when he came to the room, and had beautiful ways of cheating him when he came to examine—better than those of the other teachers.
"Before we had been with him a month he could tell us things while being examined, and no one else knew he was doing it. The initial letters of each word made up the words he wanted to crib to us, and when he scratched his head with the right hand the answer was 'No,' while with the left hand it was 'Yes'. And the clever way he taught us sedition while teaching us History, and appearing to praise the English!
"He would spend hours in praising the good men who rebelled and fought and got Magnum Charter and disrespected the King and cheeked the Government and Members of Council. We knew all about Oliver Cromwell, Hampden, Pim, and those crappies, and many a boy who had never heard of Wolsey and Alfred the Great knew all about Felton the jolly fine patriot who stabbed the Member of Council, Buckingham Esquire, in back.
"We learnt whole History book at home and he spent all History lessons telling us about Plots, all the English History Plots and foreign too, and we knew about the man who killed Henry of Navarre, as well as about the killing of French and American Presidents of to-day. He showed always why successful plots succeeded and the others failed. And he gave weeks to the American Independence War and the French Revolution.
"And all the Indian History was about the Mutiny and how and why it failed, when he was not showing us how the Englishes have ruined and robbed India, and comparing the Golden Age of India (when no cow ever died and there was never famine, plague, police nor taxes) with the miserable condition of poor bleeding India to-day.
"He was a fine fellow and so clever that we were almost his worshippers. But I am not writing his autobiography but my own, so let him lapse herewith into posterity and well-merited oblivious.
"At the College when we could work no longer, we who had never learnt crickets and tennis and ping-pongs, would take a nice big lantern with big windows in four sides of it, and sit publicly in the middle of the grass at the Gardens (with our books for a blind) and make speech to each other about Mother India and exhort each other to join together in a secret society and strike a blow for the Mother, and talk about the heroes who had died on the scaffolding for her, or who were languishing in chokey and do poojah to their photos. But the superior members did no poojah to anything. Then came the Emissary in the guise of a holy man (and I thought it the most dangerous disguise he could have assumed, for I wonder the police do not arrest every sannyasi and fakir on suspicion) and brought us the Message. And he took us to hear the blind Mussulman they call Ilderim the Weeper.
"All was ready and nothing lacked but the Instrument.
"Would any of us achieve eternal fame and undying glory by being the next Instrument?
"We wouldn't. No jolly fear, and thanks awfully.
"But we agreed to make a strike at the College and to drop a useless Browning pistol where it would be found, and in various other ways to be unrestful. And one of us, whom the Principal would not certify to sit for his F.E. and was very stony hard-up, joined the Emissary and went away with him to be a Servant and perhaps an Instrument later on (if he could not get a girl with a good dowry or a service of thirty rupees a mensem), he was so hungry and having nothing for belly.
"Yes, as Mr. Ganeshram Joshibhai used to say, that is what the British Government does for you—educates you to be passed B.A. and educated gent., and then grudges to give you thirty rupees a mensem and expects you to go searching for employment and food to put in belly! Can B.A. work with hands like maistri?
"Then there came the best of all my friends, a science-knowing gentleman who gave all his great talents to bomb. And the cream of all the milky joke was that he had learnt all his science free, from Government, at school and college, and he not only used his knowledge to be first-class superior anarchist but he got chemicals from Government own laboratory.
"His brother was in Government Engineering College and between them they did much—for one could make the bomb and the other could fill it.
"But they are both to be hanged at the same time that I am, and I do not grudge that I am to be innocently hanged for their plot and the blowing up of the bhangi by mistake for the Collector, for I have long aspired to be holy martyr in Freedom's sacred cause and have photo in newspapers and be talked about.
"Besides, as I have said, I am not being done brown, as I murdered Mr.
Spensonly, the Engineer.
"How I hated him!
"Why should he be big and strong while I am skinny and feeble—owing to night-and-day burning midnight candle at both ends and unable to make them meet?
"Besides did he not bring unmerited dishonour on grey hairs of poor old progenitor by finding him out in bribe-taking? Did he not bring my honoured father's aforesaying grey hairs in sorrow to reduced pension?
"Did he not upbraid and rebuke, nay, reproach me when I made grievous little errors and backslippers?
"A thousand times Yea.
"But I should never have murdered him had I not caught the Plague, so out of evil cometh good once more.
"The Plague came to Gungapur in its millions and we knew not what to do but stood like drowning man splitting at a straw.
"Superstitious Natives said it was the revenge of Goddess Kali for not sacrificing, and superstitious Europeans said it was a microbe created by their God to punish unhygienic way of living.
"Knowing there are no gods of any sort I am in a position to state that it was just written on our foreheads.
"To make confusion worse dumbfounded the Government of course had to seize horns of dilemma and trouble the poor. They had all cases taken to hospital and made segregation and inspection camps. They disinfected houses and burnt rags and even purdah women were not allowed to die in bosom of family. Of course police stole lakhs of rupees worth of clothes and furniture and said it was infected. And many good men who were enemies of Government were falsely accused of being plague-stricken and were dragged to hospital and were never seen again.
"Terrible calamities fell upon our city and at last it nearly lost me myself. I was seized, dragged from my family-bosom, cast into hospital and cured. And in hospital I learned from fellow who was subordinate-medical that rats get plague in sewers and cesspools and when they die of it their fleas must go elsewhere for food, and so hop on to other rat and give that poor chap plague too, by biting him with dirty mouths from dead rat, and then he dies and so in adfinitum, as the poet has it. But suppose no other rat is handy, what is poor hungry flea to do? When you can't get curry, eat rice! When flea can't get rat he eats man—turns to nastier food. (He! He!)
"So when flea from plague-stricken rat jumps on to man and bites him, poor fellow gets plague—bus.[58]
[58] Finale, enough, the end.
"Didn't friends and family-members skeddaddle and bunk when they saw rat after I told them all that! But I didn't care, I had had plague once, and one cannot get it twice. Not one man in thousand recovers when he has got it, but I did. Old uneducated fool maternal parent did lots of thanks-givings and poojah because gods specially attentive to me—but I said 'Go to, old woman. It was written on forehead.'
"And when I returned to work, one day I had an idea—an idea of how to punish Mr. Spensonly for propelling honoured parent head first out of job, and idea for striking blow at British prestige. We had our office in private bungalow in those days before new Secretariat was built, and it was unhealthy bungalow in which no one would live because they died.
"Mr. Spensonly didn't care, and he had office on top floor, but bottom floor was clerks' office who went away at night also. Now it was my painful duty to go every morning up to his office-room and see that peon had put fresh ink and everything ready and that the hamal had dusted properly. So it was not long before I was aware that all the drawers were locked except the top right-hand drawer, and that was not used as there was a biggish hole in the front of it where the edge was broken away from the above, some miscreant having once forced it open with tool.
"And verily it came to pass that one day, entering my humble abode-room, I saw a plague-rat lying suffering from in extremis and about to give up ghost. But having had plague I did not trouble about the fleas that would leave his body when it grew stiff and cold, in search of food. Instead I let it lie there while my food was being prepared, and regretted that it was not beneath the chair of some enemy of mine who had not had plague, instead of beneath my own … that of Mr. Spensonly for example!…
"It was Saturday night. I returned to the office that evening, knowing that Mr. Spensonly was out; and I went to his office-room with idle excuse to the peon sitting in verandah—and in my pocket was poor old rat kicking bucket fast.
"Who was to say I put deceasing rat in the Sahib's table-drawer just
where he would come and sit all day—being in the habit of doing work on
Sunday the Christian holy day (being a man of no religion or caste)?
What do I know of rats and their properties when at death's front door?
"Cannot rat go into a Sahib's drawer as well as into poor man's? If he did no work on Sunday very likely the fleas would remain until Monday, the rat dying slowly and remaining warm and not in rigour mortuis. Anyhow when they began to seek fresh fields and pastures new, being fed up with old rat—or rather not able to get fed up enough, they would be jolly well on the look out, and glad enough to take nibble even at an Englishman! (He! He!) So I argued, and put good old rat in drawer and did slopes. On Monday, Mr. Spensonly went early from office, feeling feverish; and when I called, as in duty bound, to make humble inquiries on Tuesday, he was reported jolly sickish with Plague—and he died Tuesday night. I never heard of any other Sahib dying of Plague in Gungapur except one missionary fellow who lived in the native city with native fellows.
"So they can hang me for share in bomb-outrage and welcome (though I never threw the bomb nor made it, and only took academic interest in affair as I told the Judge Sahib)—for I maintain with my dying breath that it was I who murdered Mr. Spensonly and put tongue in cheeks when Gungapur Gazette wrote column about the unhealthy bungalow in which he was so foolish as to have his office. When I reflect that by this time to-morrow I shall be Holy Martyr I rejoice and hope photo will be good one, and I send this message to all the world—
"'Oh be….'"
* * * * *
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Gosling-Green, M.P., liked this Pathan gentleman so well after reading his letter and enclosure. Before long they liked him very much less—although they did not know it—which sounds cryptic.