“What!” whispered Marten, “you’re a fool! A nigger policeman can’t arrest a white man!”
“He can if the white man lets him,” retorted Haywood. “There’s always a bunch of Bobbies at the Beach station and any white cop in Madras would recognize me, an’ they’d hand me out about five years of the lock-step. One of you claim my bundle’s yours, an’ take it an’ this note from the padre to the Christer it’s addressed to, an’ leave ’em there.”
“Heh, you,” he called to the officer above us; “if you want to run me in I’ll go along.”
The officer came near smiling. What native would not have envied him the honor of conducting a sahib to a police station? I swung the New Yorker’s bundle over my shoulder and we stepped out. The policeman walked at a respectful distance from his prisoner and led the way across the Maidan. Three furlongs from the railway, he entered the yard of a small, brick cottage, framed in shrubbery and flowers, and, opening the door for Haywood, closed it in our faces.
We turned away towards the Y. M. C. A. building, an imposing modern edifice that housed the addressee of Haywood’s note.
“I’ll pick you up again in a day or two,” said Marten, at the foot of the steps. “I’ve got an uncle living in town with a nigger wife, and I always touch him for a few good meals when I land here.”
The association manager consented to take charge of Haywood’s bundle, and offered me one night’s lodging until I could “look around.” I accepted gladly, though there were still four sovereigns in the band of my trousers. Force of habit led me down to the harbor; but, as I anticipated, I ran no danger of employment in that quarter. The boarding-houses swarmed with native seamen, and the shipping master had not signed on a white sailor in so long that he had concluded the type was extinct. I drifted away into the bazaars and, turning up at the association building at nightfall, retreated to a veranda of the second story with a blanket supplied by the manager.
CHAPTER XV
THE WAYS OF THE HINDU
It was my good fortune to find employment the next morning. The job was suggestive of the spy and the tattle-tale, but the most indolent of vagabonds could not have dreamed of a more ideal means of amassing a fortune. I had merely to sit still and do nothing—and draw three rupees a day for doing it. Almost the only condition imposed upon me was that the sitting must be done on a street car.
Let me explain. The electric tramways of the city of Madras are numerous and well-patronized. The company does not dare to entrust the position on the front platform to aborigines; for in case of emergency the Hindu has a remarkable faculty of being anywhere but at his post, and of doing anything but the right thing. But as conductor, a native or Eurasian of some slight education does as well as a real man. He has only to poke the pice and annas into the cash register he wears about his neck and punch and deliver a ticket. Yet it is surprising, nay, sad, to find how many accidents befall him while engaged in this simple task. He will forget, for instance, to give the passenger the ticket that is his receipt for fare paid; coppers will cling tenaciously to his fingers in spite of his best efforts to dislodge them; he has even been known, in his absent-mindedness, to overlook his friends on his tour of collection through the car. Don’t, for a moment, fancy that he is dishonest. It is merely because he is a Hindu and was born that way.