“Drop nothing,” snapped the ex-pearl fisher. “Think I’m goin’ to let a good yarn like that go to waste, an’ after me spendin’ a whole bloody day learnin’ to pronounce that dago name—an’ the skipper’s? Not me! I’m goin’ to send the Joe Taylor”—in familiar parlance he preferred the English version of the name—“over to Bombay, this time. I’ll have ’er due there in four days.”
We turned in at an imposing lodge gate and followed a graveled walk towards a great, white bungalow with windows commanding a vista of the sparkling Hoogly and the rolling plains beyond. From the veranda, curtained by trailing vines, richly-garbed servants watched our approach with the half-belligerent, half-curious air of faithful house dogs. Having no personal interest in the proceedings, I dropped into a rustic bench beside the highway. A chatter of Hindustanee greeted my companion; a stocky Punjabi rose from his heels and entered the bungalow.
There ensued a scene without precedent in my Indian experience. A tall, comely Englishman, dressed in the whitest of ducks, stepped briskly out upon the veranda, and, totally ignoring the awful gulf that separates a district commissioner from a penniless beachcomber, bawled out:—
“I say, you chaps, come inside and have some breakfast.”
Much less would have been my astonishment had he suddenly opened fire on us from a masked battery. I looked up to see Marten leaning weakly against a veranda post.
“I only come with my mate, sir,” I explained. “It’s him as wants the ticket. I’m only waitin’, sir.”
“Then come along and have some breakfast while you wait,” retorted the Englishman. “Early risers have good appetites, and where would you buy anything fit to eat in Hoogly? I’ve finished, but Maghmoód has covers laid for you.”
We entered the bungalow on tiptoe and took places at a flower-decked table. Two turbaned servants slipped noiselessly into the room and served us viands of other lands. A punkah-wallah on the veranda kept the great fans in motion. Upon me fell the vague sense of having witnessed scenes like this in some former existence. Even here, then, on the banks of the Hoogly, men ate with knives and forks from delicate china ware, wiping their fingers on snow-white linen rather than on a leg of their trousers, and left fruit peelings on their plates instead of throwing them under the table! It seemed anachronistic.
“I told you,” murmured Marten, finishing his steak and a long silence, and mopping his plate dry with a slice of bread plastered with butter from far-off Denmark; “I told you he was a real sport. He’s the same one, an’ give me a swell hand-out four years ago.”
Maghmoód entered bearing cigars and cigarettes on a silver tray, and the information that we were to follow the commissioner to his office, two miles distant.