The rickshaw men of Colombo
American wanderers who slept in the Gordon Gardens of Colombo. Left to right: Arnold, ex-New York ward heeler; myself; “Dick Haywood”; an English lad; and Marten of Tacoma, Washington
But not so Marten. While we fled, he swam straight for the coming monsters of the deep. When they were almost upon him he dived with a shout of hilarity and a dash of foam into their very midst, to come to the surface smiling and unscathed, perhaps far out across the harbor, perhaps under our dangling feet. How he put the sharks to flight no man knew. The “gang” was divided in its opinion between the assertion of the swimmer himself that he “tickled ’em under the belly,” and the conviction of Askins that he had merely to show them his face—for Marten was not afflicted with manly beauty.
The last member of our party was a bully born on the Bowery, younger in years than Marten, older in rascality than Henderson. As to his name, he owned to several, and assured us at the first meeting that “Dick Haywood” would do well enough for the time being. His chief claim to fame was his own assertion that he had escaped from Sing Sing after serving two years of a seven-year sentence. The story of his “get-away,” with which he often entertained twilight gatherings on the jetty, smacked of veracity. For all an innate skepticism, I found no reason to disagree with the conclusion of the “gang” that his “song and dance” was true. Certainly there was no doubt among his most casual acquaintances of his ability to get into Sing Sing. He was clever enough, fortune favoring, to have broken out.
Fleeing his native land, Haywood had brought up in Bombay and, having enlisted in the British army, was assigned to a garrison in Rajputana. Obviously, so temperamental a youth must soon weary of the guard duty and pipe-clay polishing that make up the long, long Indian day of Tommy Atkins. He engineered a second “get-away.” The enlistment papers and a buttonless uniform in his bundle certified to this adventure. In the course of time he reached Calcutta, chiefly through the fortune of finding himself alone in a compartment of the Northwest Mail with a Parsee merchant of more worldly wealth than physical prowess. A rumor of this escapade soon drove him to Madras. There his unconventional habits again asserted themselves and fortune temporarily deserted him. He was taken in the bazaars in the act of “weeding the leathers.”
Once more he escaped, this time from a crowded court room, and finding India no longer attractive, turned southward to Ceylon, hoping to make a final “get-away” by sea.
Few of “the boys” gave credence to these last tales. But they were true. For a newcomer in the ranks reported on the day of his arrival, before he had laid eyes on the culprit, that Madras was placarded with descriptions—they fitted Haywood exactly—of a man charged with desertion, robbery, pick-pocketing, and escape from custody.
Awaking penniless on the morning following my return from Kandy, I decided to investigate a charity system in vogue in British-India. Kind-hearted sahibs, members of a national association known as the “Friend-in-Need Society,” maintain in the larger cities a refuge for stranded Europeans and Eurasians. Above the door of each Society building appear the initial letters of its title. The inventive wanderer, for other reasons than this, perhaps, has dubbed the kindly institution the “Finish.”
In Colombo the Society offered only out-door relief, meal tickets distributed by its president or secretary. I found the first of these officials to be the youthful editor of Colombo’s English newspaper, with offices a ship’s length from Gordon Gardens. Tickets, however, had he none.