I suppose to those who live in a military district, sham fights are ordinary affairs, but I had never seen one before, and it struck me as very ludicrous to see these men, in most desperate earnestness, crouching in ambush, dodging behind trees, and crawling along under cover to escape the fire of their foes. The little Goorkhas become wildly excited, and it would not do to allow the two sides to come to close quarters, or the sham fight might develop into a real one.
The other European male inhabitants of Remyo, are the inevitable Indian Civilian and "Bombay Burman," whom of course I should not presume to analyse; two railway men (who seem superfluous as there is as yet no railway), a P.W.D. (Public Works Department) man, whose work, it seems, is to make roads (from my point of view as a cyclist they don't do him credit), an Engineer, and the Policeman.
This last was a mighty shikarri, who had hunted and shot every imaginable animal; who knew the habits and customs of all the beasts of the jungle, and after examining a "kill" would give a whole history of the fight between the tiger and its victim. He was a mighty talker too, and would converse for hours on any subject.
What he could not accomplish was to speak for three minutes without giving way to exaggeration; nor could he give an unvarnished reply to a plain question, so that in Remyo "if you want to know the time don't ask a policeman" is the popular aphorism.
The Engineer possessed the most striking characteristics amongst the men of the place. I have never met a man so full of information. He was one of those men who can give information on every conceivable subject, for if he knows nothing about it, he will invent a few facts on the spur of the moment, facts of which he is always justly proud.
I never quite made up my mind whether his actions were the outcome of a passion for practical joking, or a desire to be of use, but I try to believe the latter. When I punctured my bicycle tyre he insisted upon helping me to mend it. His process occupied the whole of an afternoon, and the front veranda and drawing-room; beyond this, it was too intricate to describe, except to say that it required all the available tooth brushes in the house, three basins of water, and a rupee piece, and necessitated, apparently, the cutting of a large hole in the inner tube, with a patent tyre remover he had invented out of a broken teaspoon.
On another occasion, he assured us he had a splendid plan for preventing our drawing room stove from smoking. We had been obliged to put a stove in the drawing room to make up for the absence of a fire place; it was a primitive affair, with a chimney that went through a hole in the wall, and it smoked "somethink hawful." Our friend tried his plan and a dozen others, each more wonderful and complicated than the last, and each necessitating fresh holes in the already perforated wall. Each plan too, resulted in increased volumes of smoke, and as the furniture and carpet were being rapidly ruined, and our whilom happy home was being broken up, we finally remedied the matter ourselves.
But the matter wherein our Engineer excelled himself, was in the matter of rose trees.