When a transparent kanat, which fails by three feet to reach ceiling or floor, is the only bar between the East and the West, he would be a churl indeed who stood upon “invidious race distinctions.” The Englishman went out and fraternised with the Military—the four-rupee soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They were armed, one with an old Tower musket crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a native-made smooth-bore, and one with a composite contrivance—English sporting muzzle-loader stock with a compartment for a jointed cleaning-rod, and hammered octagonal native barrel, wire-fastened, with a tuft of cotton on the foresight. All three guns were loaded, and the owners were very proud of them. They were simple folk, these men at arms, with an inordinate appetite for broiled fish. They were not always soldiers they explained. They cultivated their crops until wanted for any duty that might turn up. They were paid, now and again, at intervals, but they were paid in coin and not in kind.
The munshis and the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little gathering on the bund was unrestrained. The chowkidar came out of his cave into the firelight. Warm wood ashes, by the way, like Epp’s cocoa, are “grateful and comforting” to cold toes. He took a fish and incontinently choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right again, he launched into a very long and quite unintelligible story while the sepoys said reverently:—“He is an old man and remembers many things.” As he babbled, the night shut in upon the lake and the valley of Boondi. The last cows were driven into the water for their evening drink, the waterfowl and the monkeys went to bed, and the stars came out and made a new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the lake. The light of the fire showed the ruled line of the bund springing out of the soft darkness of the wooded hill on the left and disappearing into the solid darkness of the bare hill on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep wandering pigs from the gardens whose tree-tops rose to a level with the bund-edge. Beyond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle buzz of the unseen city died out, it seemed as though the bund were the very Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one knows, between this world and the next. The water lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, blurring the peace of the reflected heavens.
“And duller should I be than some fat weed
That rots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf.”
The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe’s wharf. The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in the hills; thus after as long a life as the chowkidar’s, dying easily and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the lake. Surely no one would come to reclaim him, across those weary, weary miles of rock-strewn road.... “And this,” said the chowkidar, raising his voice to enforce attention, “is true talk. Everybody knows it, and now the Sahib knows it. I am an old man.” He fell asleep at once, with his hand on the chillam that was doing duty for a whole hukka among the company. He had been talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.
See how great a man is the true novelist! Six or seven thousand miles away, Walter Besant of the Golden Pen had created Mr. Maliphant—the ancient of figureheads, in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and here, in Boondi, the Englishman had found Mr. Maliphant in the withered flesh. So he drank Walter Besant’s health in the water of the Burra Talao. One of the sepoys turned himself round, with a clatter of accoutrements, shifted his blanket under his elbow, and told a tale. It had something to do with his khet, and a gunna which certainly was not sugar-cane. It was elusive. At times it seemed that it was a woman, then changed to a right of way, and lastly appeared to be a tax; but the more he attempted to get at its meaning through the curious patois in which its doings or its merits were enveloped, the more dazed the Englishman became. None the less the story was a fine one, embellished with much dramatic gesture which told powerfully against the firelight. Then the second sepoy, who had been enjoying the chillam all the time, told a tale, the purport of which was that the dead in the tombs round the lake were wont to get up of nights and shikar. This was a fine and ghostly story; and its dismal effect was much heightened by some clamour of the night far up the lake beyond the floor of stars.
The third sepoy said nothing. He had eaten too much fish and was fast asleep by the side of the chowkidar.
[Page 234]—“This was a fine and ghostly story.”
They were all Mahomedans, and consequently all easy to deal with. A Hindu is an excellent person, but ... but ... there is no knowing what is in his heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange observances.
The Hindu or Mahomedan bent, which each Englishman’s mind must take before he has been three years in the country is, of course, influenced by Province or Presidency. In Rajputana generally, the Political swears by the Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is untrustworthy. But a man who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it has been doctored with shrab, cannot be very bad after all.