“I couldn’t read the bloody wire without me glasses,” he confided, as I drew near, “an’ I don’t think I’ll be able to find ’em before this ’ere ticket’s run out. We don’t git h’off fer a run up to Madras every fortn’ght, an’ I ayn’t goin’ to miss this one.”
As I turned back to join my companions, the missionary from Kansas appeared at the door of the same compartment. Evidently he had thought better of his heartless decision to leave me to perdition, for he flung the door wide open.
“Come and ride with me to the next station,” he commanded; “I want to talk to you.”
“I’m third-class,” I answered.
“Never mind,” said the padre, “I know the guard.”
Having no other plausible excuse to offer, I complied, and endured a half-hour sermon. Through it all, Bobby sat stiffly erect in his corner, for to my amazement the minister did not once address him.
“How’s this?” I demanded, as we drew into the first station. The Kansan was choosing some tracts from his luggage in the next compartment. “Why don’t he try to convert you, being so good a subject?”
“’E did,” growled Bobby, “bloody ’ell, ’e did. But I shut ’im off. Told ’im I was one o’ the shinin’ lights o’ the Salvation Army in Colombo. Blawst me h’eyes, why can’t these padres sing their song to the niggers an’ let h’onest Englishmen alone! One of ’em gits to wind’ard o’ me every time I breaks h’out fer a little holidye.”
Armed with the tracts, I returned to my solicitous companions and settled down to view the passing landscape. It bore small resemblance to that of Ceylon. On either hand stretched treeless flat-lands, parched and brown as Sahara, a desert blazed at by an implacable sun and unwatered for months. A few native husbandmen, remnant of the workers in abundant season, toiled on in the face of frustrated hopes, scratching with worthless wooden plows the arid soil, that refused to give back the seed intrusted to it. There is no sadder, more forlorn, more hopeless of human creatures than this man of the masses in India. His clothing in childhood consists of a string around his belly and a charm-box on his left arm. Grown to man’s estate, he adds to this a narrow strip of cotton, tied to the string behind and hanging over it in front. Regularly, each morning, he draws forth a preparation of coloring matter and cow-dung—for the cow is a sacred animal—and daubs on his forehead the sign of his caste, but the strip of cotton he renews only when direst necessity demands. His home is a wretched mud hut, too low to stand in, where he burrows by night and squats on his heels by day. With the buoyant Singhalese he has little in common. Sad-faced ever, if he smiles there is no joy in the grimace. Enchained and bound down by an inexorable system of caste, held in the bondage of an enforced habit of mind, habitually overcome with a sense of his own inferiority, he is disgusting in his groveling.
A hundred miles north of the seacoast, we halted to visit the famous Brahmin temple of Madura. Haywood’s interest in architecture was confined to such details as the strength and resistance of window bars, but he had developed a quaking fear of daytime solitude and would not be separated from us.