“Sure. Won’t you?”
“Eh—er—wha—I? When I play tennis? Why, of course, for exercise; but you were talking about work.”
“Well, let’s call it exercise if you’d rather.”
He stared at me a moment in silence, but, being an unusually quick-witted Englishman, grinned as he turned away.
“Very well,” he said, over his shoulder, “wait for me over at the second court. I’ll give you a rupee a set—in railway fare—to-morrow.”
I was perspiringly engaged as official ball-chaser of the Delhi tennis club until twilight put an end to the sport, fagging three games for the commissioner and as many more for his friends. The reward, however, was not immediately forthcoming; and I turned back as penniless as I had come, towards Delhi, four miles distant. The half-audible melody of a summer night was broken now and then by the patter of native feet along the dusty roadway, but I tramped on for the most part in silence. Once I was startled by a lusty chorus of male voices that burst out suddenly from the darkness ahead in words of my own tongue; and a moment later a squad of red-coats, bound barrack-ward after a merry afternoon on leave, trooped by me, arm in arm, singing at the top of their lungs, “The Place where the Punkah-wallah Died.” It is a sorrowful ditty, this favorite ballad of the Tommy Atkins of India, bearing as it does the final word on the infernal calidity of the peninsula. The punkah-wallah is as insensible to the sun’s rays as any living mortal, his station is a shaded veranda, his labor the languid moving of a weightless fan. He of the ballad died of the heat at his post.
Bent on finding lodging in a deserted coach, I slid down the steep slope at the edge of the European section into the broad railway yards. A policeman patrolled the bank above; detectives lurked in the narrow alleyways between the long rows of side-tracked cars; and the headlights of puffing switch-engines turned streaks of the night into broad day. I escaped detection only by vigilant dodging. There were goods’ vans without number, an endless forest of them, but they were sealed or loaded with some vile-smelling cargo; passenger coach was there none. I struck off boldly across the tracks towards the lighted station. The glare of a head-light was turned full upon me and without the slightest warning I felt myself launched into space so suddenly that I did not lose my upright posture. The sensation of falling seemed of several minutes’ duration, as one experiences in a dream of being thrown from a high building. Long after the world above had disappeared, I landed in utter darkness, all unhurt except for the barking of my nose. Near at hand several live coals gleamed like watching eyes. I had walked into a cinder-pit on the round-house track.
A lady of quality of Delhi out for a drive
