Now the Hindu has never been able to see what advantage or satisfaction arises from marring the visage of an enemy. He takes great joy in giving a foe unpleasant information concerning the doings of his ancestors back to the sixth generation, in carrying off his wife, or in gathering together a band of friends to accuse him in court of some atrocious crime. But his anger rarely expresses itself in muscular activity.
“When a sahib becomes angry,” a babu once confided to me, “he goes insane. He loses his mind and makes his hands hard and pushes them often and swiftly into the face or the stomach of the other man, or makes his feet go against him behind. It is because he is crazy that he does such foolish things, that have not something to do with the thing that has made him angry.”
Having no fear, therefore, of being repaid in his own coin, Haywood had contracted the pleasant little habit of “beating up” a native on the slightest provocation. Such conduct, of course, is not confined to beachcombers. Many a European hotel in the Orient displays conspicuous placards politely requesting guests not to beat or kick the servants; but to make their complaints to the manager.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the Hindu heartily deserves an occasional chastisement. The subtle ways in which he can annoy a white man without committing an act that can legally be punished, transcend the imagination of the Western mind. For centuries past, too, the sahib has been permitted to defend himself against such persecution after the orthodox manner of the Occident. But the good old days, alas, are gone. A very few years ago an act was passed making assault upon a native a crime. The world outside credited it to the humanity of Lord Curzon. Residents within the country whisper that an overwhelming desire to win the good will of the natives had its rise at the moment when a certain great European power began to gaze longingly from its bleak steppes in the north upon this vast peninsula below the Himalayas. The Hindu, of course, has not been slow to realize his new power. Slap a native lightly in the face, and the probability is that he will appear in court to-morrow with a lacerated and bleeding countenance and a score of friends prepared to swear on anything from the Vedas to the ashes of a sacred bull that you inflicted the injury.
Haywood was fully cognizant of this state of affairs. Certainly it would have been wisdom, too, on the part of one anxious to pass through India as unostentatiously as possible to have endured an occasional petty annoyance, rather than to attract attention by resenting it. But endurance was not Haywood’s strong point, and a score of times we felt called upon to warn him that his belligerency would bring him to grief.
In the early morning after our departure from Trichinopoly, the prophecy was fulfilled. The express stopped at a suburban station of Madras, and Haywood beckoned to a vendor of bananas on the platform. Now the youths of India are wont to gamble with bananas, because matches are too costly, and we were not surprised that the New Yorker blazed up wrathfully when the hawker demanded two annas for four.
He paid the exorbitant price under protest, and settled down to break his fast. The fruit, however, proved to be long past the stage when it could appeal to a sahib taste, and the purchaser rose to shake his fist at the deceitful vendor. The shadow of a derisive grin played on the features of the native; the thumb of his outspread hand hovered, entirely by accident, around the end of his nose; and he fell to chanting a ditty that a man ignorant of the tongue of Madras would have considered quite harmless.
“He says,” interpreted Marten, “that your grandfather was the son of a pig, and fed your father on the entrails of a yellow dog; that your grandmother gave birth to seven puppies, and your mo—”
But Haywood had snatched open the door, and, before the terrified native could move, he “made his foot go against him behind” in no uncertain manner. The Hindu shrieked like a lost soul thrown into the bottomless pit, abandoned his basket, and ran screaming down the platform.
Barely had the New Yorker regained his seat when a native officer appeared at the window.