A score of smart traps and dog carts, in charge of gorgeously liveried saïs were drawn up about the long, two-story club-house. On the neighboring courts four pairs of linen-clad Englishmen, surrounded by a select audience of admiring memsahibs and a hundred wondering servants, were playing tennis with that deliberate, dispassionate energy which the Briton of the “clawsses” puts into everything from a casual greeting to a suicide. The honorable commissioner sahib K. C. B., M. A., V. C, Bart, etc., was stretched out in a reclining chair in the smoking-room of the club, his attention divided between a cigarette and cooling beverage and the activities of several other distinguished preservers of the alphabet, who were driving a red and two white balls about a green table with characteristic vim and vigor. The native who pointed out the mighty man from the shelter of a veranda fern refused in an awe-struck whisper to deliver my message until I had threatened to enter this sanctum of social superiority unannounced. The Englishman bellowed a protest at being disturbed, but rose and advanced to the door, glass in hand.
“I say, you know,” he cried, in a voice having its domicile in the pit of his stomach, “this isn’t my office, my man. I cawn’t be attending to official duties day and night. Come to the high-court to-morrow and I will look into your case.”
“If any of the gentlemen inside, sir, or you, could put me onto a job where I could earn the price of a tick—”
“A job! In Delhi? Do you fawncy there are full-rigged ships on the Jumna? Come to my office at ten-thirty or eleven in the morning.”
“But to-morrow is a holiday.”
“Hah! By Jove, so it is! Well, come to my bungalow instead.”
“How about some work about the club? Anything at all.”
“See here, my man,” protested the commissioner, turning away, “this is no employment bureau. I’m going over for a game of tennis and I’ll bid you good day.”
“Then you’ll need someone to chase tennis balls for you,” I called after him, “I’m fairly fast on my feet.”
“Chase tennis balls!” cried the governor, coming back. “Do you mean you would run around before a crowd of native servants—you—a white man—and—”