I was admitted to the McIntosh household—I and my good tobacco.
But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by day. Friends buying horses would not understand it.
Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed at this, and said simply:—“You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done exactly the same thing, Good Heavens! I was once”—he spoke as though he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment—“an Oxford Man!” This accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds' stable.
“You,” said McIntosh, slowly, “have not had that advantage; but, to outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet I am not certain. You are—forgive my saying so even while I am smoking your excellent tobacco—painfully ignorant of many things.”
We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronized by a loafer, but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags. He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially:—“All things considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That for instance.”—He pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.
“There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the Spanish Monk meant when he said—
'I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp—
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp.—'
and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs. McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of the people of the country—of whom, by the way, you know nothing.”
The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong. The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten.
McIntosh Jellaludin apologized, saying:—