But for a sign over the entrance, the Home might have been taken for the estate of an English gentleman of modest income. The grounds were extensive and well-wooded. The gate was guarded by a lodge, beyond which the Home itself, a low, rambling bungalow, peeped through the trees. A score of vagabonds, burned brown in face and garb, loitered in the shade along the curb. Half were Eurasians. There is no more irreclaimable vagrant under the sun’s rays than the tropical half-breed when once he joins the fraternity of the Great Unwashed. Reputation or personal appearance are to him matters of utter indifference. A threadbare jacket and trousers—sad commentaries of the willfulness of the dhoby—mark his social superiority to the coolie; but he goes barefooted by choice, often bareheaded, and in his abhorrence of unnecessary activity is as truly a Hindu as his maternal ancestor. Like the native, too, he is indifferent to bodily affliction—so it bring no pain—and laughs at encroaching disease as though he shared with the Brahmin the conviction that his present form is only one of hundreds that he will inhabit.
At our arrival a youth of this class was entertaining the assembled wanderers with a spicy tale. His language was the lazy, half-enunciated English of the tropical hybrid, and he chuckled with glee as often as his companions. Yet he was a victim of the dread “elephantiasis” so common among natives. His left foot and leg below the knee were swollen to four times their natural size, and to accommodate the abnormal limb his trouser leg was split to the thigh. As the gate opened, he rose and dragged his incurable affliction with him, leaving in the sand footprints like the nest of a mongrel cur.
The manager was a bullet-headed Irishman, chosen, like many another, for his knowledge of the wily ways of the vagrant, gleaned in many a year “on the road.” The Home, though more ambitious in its scope, resembled the Asile Rudolph of Cairo. The meals, consisting of native food, were served in the same generous portions, and the cots, in spite of the unconventional habits of the inmates, were as scrupulously clean. Adjoining the quarters of the transient guests, the society provided a permanent home for aged and crippled beachcombers. We sat late under the veranda, listening to strange tales of the road of earlier days from a score of old cronies who quarreled for a pinch of tobacco and wept when their words were discredited. Sad fate, indeed, for those who, in the years of their strength and inspiration, had made the world their playground, to be sentenced thus to end their days in the meager bit of space to which sightless eyes or paralyzed limbs confined them, while they wandered on in spirit over boundless seas and trackless land.
Early the next morning the manager led the way to the Beach station and, having supplied Marten with a ticket to Vizagapatam and a day’s “batter,” bade us bon voyage. The journey was long; it might also have been uneventful but for my companion’s incorrigible longing to annoy his fellow-beings. The weak point in Marten’s make-up was his head. Years before, during his days before the mast, he had gone ashore in a disreputable port after paying off from a voyage of several months’ duration and, overladen with good cheer, had been so successfully sand-bagged that he not only lost his earnings but emerged from the encounter with a broken head. At the hospital it was found necessary to trepan his skull. But the metal plate had proved a poor substitute for sound bone; and the ex-pearl-fisher was wont to warn every new acquaintance to beware “horse-play,” as a blow on the head might result in serious injury.
The favorite occupation of the Hindu on his travels is sleeping. If there is an alien voyager in his compartment he sits stiffly in his place, on guard against a loss of caste. When his companions are all of his own class, he stretches out on his back and slumbers, open-mouthed, like a dead fish. But the benches are short. The native, therefore, seeks relief by sticking his feet out the window. An Indian train bristles from engine to guard-van with bare, brown legs that give it the aspect of a battery of small guns.
Our express had halted, late in the afternoon, on a switch beside a train southward bound. Marten, chancing to have a straw in his possession, leaned out of the window and fell to tickling the soles of a pair of protruding feet. Their owner was a sound sleeper. For several moments he did not stir. As our train started, he awoke suddenly and sprang up with so startling a whoop that my companion recoiled in surprise and struck his head sharply on the top of the window.
The native was quickly avenged. For a moment his tormentor clung to the casement, straining in every limb, then fell to the floor, writhing in agony. Plainly he had lost consciousness, but he thrashed about the compartment like a captive boa constrictor, twisting body and limbs in racking contortions, and foaming at the mouth until his ashy face was covered with spume, and dirt from the floor. His strength was supernatural. To attempt to control him was useless,—forbidden, in fact, on the day that he had warned me of his injury. I took refuge on one of the benches to escape his convulsions.
The express sped on in the falling darkness. The next station was far distant. Before me rose a vision of myself surrounded by stern officials and attempting in vain to explain the presence of a corpse in my compartment. Foolhardy, indeed, had I been to choose such a companion.
For a long hour his fit continued. Then the contortions of his body diminished little by little; his arms and legs twitched spasmodically in lessening jerks; his eyes, glassy and bloodshot, opened for a moment, closed again, and he lay still. Through the interminable night he stretched prone on the floor, motionless as a cadaver. When morning broke in the east he sat up suddenly with a jest on his lips and none the worse, apparently, for his ravings. But his memory retained no record of occurrences from the moment when the wild shout of the Hindu had sounded in his ears three hundred miles away.
An hour later we were purchasing sweetmeats in the bazaars of Vizagapatam. The flat, sun-baked fields of southern India had been left behind. The surrounding country was hilly and verdant; to the eastward stretched the blue bay of Bengal. In the offing a ship lay at anchor. Naked coolies, bent double under bales and bundles, waded waist-deep into the sea and cast their burdens into a lighter. Adjoining the bazaars, a sudra village of inhabited haycocks huddled together in a valley. Before the huts men, women, and children crouched on their haunches in the dust, their cadaverous knees on a level with their sunken eyes, their fleshless talons clawing at scraps of half-putrid food. Now and again they snarled at each other. More often they stared away as vacantly as ruminating animals at the vista of squalor beyond. Beside the village rose a barren rock, monument to the medley of religions that inflict India. On its summit, within a space of little more than an acre, commanding an outlook far out over the sea, stood a Brahmin temple, a Mohammedan mosque, and a Christian church, each reached by its own stairway cut in the perpendicular face of the rock.