I followed the example of the pair in reducing my attire to the regulation coolie costume and, turning my bundled clothing into a pillow, sweated out the night.
Over the tea, bananas, and cakes of ground cocoanut that made up the Almeida breakfast, I exchanged yarns with my companions of the night. The Swede was merely a sailor; the older man a less commonplace being. He was an Irishman named John Askins, a master of arts of Dublin University and a civil engineer by profession. Twenty years before, an encroaching asthma had driven him from his native island. In his wanderings through every tropical country under British rule, he had picked up a fluent use of half the dialects of the east, from the clicking Kaffir to the guttural tongue of Kabul. Not by choice was Askins, M. A., a vagabond. Periodically, however, employment failed him and he fell, as now, into the ranks of those who listened open-mouthed—when he chose to abandon the slang of “the road” and the forecastle—to his professorial diction.
Brief as was my acquaintance with Ceylon, I had already discovered two possible openings to the wage-earning class. The first was to join the police force. Half the European officers of Colombo had once been beachcombers. Between them and our band existed a liaison so close that the misdemeanors of “the boys” were rarely punished, and more than one white castaway was housed surreptitiously in the barracks on Slave Island. I had no hesitancy, therefore, in applying for information to the Irishman whose beat embraced the cricket-ground separating Pettah from the European quarter.
He painted the life in uniform in glowing colors. His salary was fifty rupees a month. No princely income, surely, for bear in mind that it takes three rupees to make a dollar. The “graft,” too, he admitted sadly, was next to nothing. Yet he supported a wife—a white one, at that, strange to say—and three children, kept several servants, owned a house of his own, and increased his bank account on every pay day. Ludicrous, you know, is the cost of living in Ceylon.
I hurried eagerly away to the office of the superintendent of police. An awkward squad of white recruits was sprinkling with perspiration the green before the government bungalow, from which a servant emerged to inquire my errand. The alacrity with which I was admitted to the inner sanctum aroused within me visions of myself in uniform that were by no means dispelled by the hasty examination to which the superintendent subjected me.
“Yes! Yes!” he broke in, before I had answered his last question; “I think we can take you on all right. By the way, what part of the country are you from? You’ll be from Yorkshire side, I take it?”
“United States.”
“A-oh! You don’t say so? An American! Really, you don’t look it, you know. What a shame! Had a beat all picked out for you. But as an American you’d better go to the Philippines and apply on the force there. We can’t give you anything in Ceylon or India, don’t you know. Awfully sorry. Good day.”
None but a man ignorant of the ways of the Far East could have conceived my second scheme in one sleepless night. It was suggested by the fact that, in earlier years, I had, as the Englishman puts it, “gone in for” cross-country running. Returning to Almeida’s, I soon picked up a partner for the projected enterprise. He was a young and lanky Englishman, who, though he had never indulged in athletic sports, was certain that in eluding for a decade the police of four continents he had developed a record-breaking stride.
In a shady corner of Gordon Gardens we arranged the details of our plan, which was—why not admit it at once?—to become ’rickshaw runners. The hollow-chested natives who plied this equestrian vocation leased their vehicles from the American consul. That official surely would be glad to rent the two fine, new carriages that stood idle in his establishment. The license would cost little. Cloth slippers that sold for a few cents in the bazaars would render us as light-footed as our competitors. We could not, of course, offer indiscriminate service. Half the population of Colombo would have swept down upon us, clamoring for the unheard-of honor of riding behind a sahib. But nothing would be easier than to hang above our licenses the announcement, “for white men only.”