Hindu women drinking cocoanut-milk
By dint of a cat-like spring from the top of the largest heap of ashes, I grasped the rail above and drew myself out, to find the engine crew preparing to descend into the pit to recover my body. The station platform was crowded. Beyond, surrounded on all sides by the teeming bazaars, lay a thick-wooded park known as Queen’s Gardens. Placards on the ten-foot picket fence forbade trespassing after nightfall; but though I climbed the barrier in full sight of strollers and shopkeepers they held their peace, convinced, no doubt, that the sahib who entered at that hour was called thither by official duties. I stretched out in the long grass, but the foliage overhead offered no such shelter as the trees of equatorial Ceylon, and I awoke in the morning dripping wet from the fallen dew.
Again that afternoon I did service at the tennis court, earning two rupees more than the sum required to carry me back to Calcutta, and, returning to the city, boarded the Saturday night express. The European compartment was commodious and furnished not only with a wash-room but with two wooden shelves on which I slept by night, undisturbed by Eurasian collectors. Following the direct line through Cawnpore and Allahabad, the train drew into Howrah on Monday morning. Not once during the journey had my box-stall been invaded. Nine hundred and fifty-four miles I had traveled, in a private car on an express—and the ticket had cost $2.82! Truly, impecunious victims of the Wanderlust should look upon India as the promised land.
CHAPTER XVII
BEYOND THE GANGES
Two hours after my arrival in Calcutta there entered the American consulate, high up above the Maidan, a white man who should have won the sympathy even of the hard-hearted manager who had denied him admittance to the Sailors’ Home for once having deserted that institution for a trip “up-country.” He was the possessor of a single rupee. His cotton garments, thanks to dhobies, Ganges mud, and forty-two hundred miles of third-class travel, were threadbare rags through which the tropical sun had reddened his once white skin. Under one arm he carried a tattered, sunburned bundle of the size of a kodak. European residents of a far-off district might have recognized in him the erstwhile ball-chaser of the tennis club of Delhi. In short, ’twas I.
“Years before you were born,” said the white-haired sahib who listened to my story, “I was American consul in Calcutta, the chief of whose duties since that day has been to listen to the hard-luck tales of stranded seamen. Times have changed, but the stories haven’t, and won’t, I suppose, so long as there are women and beer, and land-sharks ashore to turn sailors into beachcombers.”
As he talked he filled out a form with a few strokes of a pen.
“This chit,” he said, handing it to me, “is good for a week at the Methodist Seamens’ Institute. You have small chance of finding work in Calcutta, though you might try Smith Brothers, the American dentists, down the street; and you certainly won’t sign on. But get out of town, somewhere, somehow, before the week is over.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, opening the door. “Oh, say, Mr. Consul, was there an American fellow by name of Haywood in to see you?”
“Haywood?” mused the old man. “You mean Dick Haywood, that poor seaman who was robbed and beaten on an Italian sailing vessel, and kicked ashore here without his wages?”