We turned away toward the Young Men’s Christian Association building.

“I’ll pick you up in a day or two,” said Marten, at the foot of the steps. “I’ve got an uncle living in town, and I always go to see him when I land here.”

CHAPTER XVIII
THE WAYS OF THE HINDU

It was my good fortune to find employment while in Madras. The job was the easiest I had yet had, and it brought me three rupees a day. All I had to do was to sit in street-cars and watch the Hindu conductors poke the fares paid into the cash-registers they wear around their necks, and to make sure they did not make a mistake and put some of the coppers into their pockets instead. For the Hindu makes many mistakes, and is naturally so careless that he has even been known to forget to collect fares from his friends on the car.

Thus for merely sitting on different cars all day, and reporting to the street railway company any conductor who made such mistakes, I was paid three rupees a day. It gave me an excellent chance to see Madras.

As I was riding through the city I noticed that there were almost no horses there. Their place was taken by leather-skinned, rice-fed coolies. These natives were hitched to heavy two-wheeled carts, which squawked horribly as they were drawn through the streets. Perhaps the natives did not know that axle-grease would make them run more smoothly. Yet two of these thin, starved-looking coolies will draw a wagon loaded with great bales from the ships, or a dozen steel rails, for miles over hills and hollows, with fewer breathing spells than a truckman would allow a team of horses.

One day I came upon a sight that surprised me. At a corner where the car in which I sat swung toward the harbor, a gang of coolies was repairing a roadway. That in itself was no cause for wonder. But among the workmen, dressed like the others in a ragged cloth around the hips, swinging his hammer as dully, gazing as stupidly at the ground as his companions, was a white man! There could be no doubt of it. Under the tan of an Indian sun his skin was fiery red, and his eyes were blue! But a white man doing such work, in company with the most miserable, the lowest, the most despised of human creatures! To become a sudra and ram stones in the public streets, dressed in nothing but a clout! Suppose that I were obliged to come to such an end! A terror came upon me, a longing to flee while there was yet time from the unfortunate land in which a man of my own flesh and blood could fall to this.

Again and again my rounds of the city brought me back to that same corner. The fallen one toiled slowly on, bending hopelessly over his task, never raising his head to glance at the passers-by. Twice I was about to get off the car and speak to him, to learn his dreadful story. But the car had rumbled on before I gathered courage. Leaving the office as twilight fell, I passed that way again. A babu (educated Hindu) standing near the edge of the sidewalk began talking to me in English, and I asked him about the white laborer.

“What! That?” he said, following the direction of my finger. “Why, that’s a Hindu albino” (colorless Hindu).

One day I decided to have my clothes washed by a Hindu laundryman, called a dhoby. The dhoby is a hard-working man. High above his head he swings each streaming garment, and slaps it down again and again on the flat stone at his feet, as if he were determined to split it into bits. When his strength gives out, he flings down the tog, and jumps up and down on it as if he had lost his reason. His bare feet tread wildly, and when he can dance no longer he falls upon the helpless rag, and tugs and strains and twists and pulls as if determined that it shall come to be washed no more. Flying buttons fill him with glee. When he can beat and tramp and tug no longer, he tosses the shreds that are left scornfully into the stream. Yet he is strictly honest: at nightfall he takes back to its owner the dirt he carried away and the threads that hold it together.