‘You awful blackguard!’ I exclaim. ‘Your mother dead—dead again! Look here—look here!’ And I turn up my diary and shew him, under date August 9, 186-, nearly two years past and gone: ‘Sam’s mother reported dead for the second time by Sam, &c.’
Then he slinks away discomfited; and I hear him in his smoky kitchen growling and grumbling, and no doubt anathematising me and mine past, present, and future.
My first introduction to Sam was after this wise. I had come down from Bombay to Beypore with troops in a small steamer, and Mr Sam, who had either deserted or been sent away from the Abyssinian Expedition, in which he had been a camp-follower, was also a passenger in the same ship. Of this craft a word en passant, for I have to this day a lively and by no means pleasant olfactory recollection of her. She was the dirtiest vessel in which I ever put foot; guiltless of paint from keel to truck; all grime, coal-soot, and tar from stem to stern. She had but recently taken a cargo of mules to Annesley Bay; and but scant if any application of water and deodorants had followed the disembarkation of the animals. The ‘muley’ flavour still therefore clung closely to bulkhead and planking; it hung about cordage and canvas; it penetrated saloon and sleeping-berth; it even overpowered the smell of the rancid grease with which pistons and wheels were lubricated. Worthy Captain B—— the skipper assured us that deck and hold, sides and bulwarks, had been well scoured in Bombay; but as the old salt’s views of scrubbing, judging from his personal appearance, were infinitesimally limited, we opined that the ship’s ablution had been as little as was that of its commander’s diurnal tub.
But to return to Sam. The poor fellow was wandering about the streets of Beypore coinless and curry-and-rice-less, when he stumbled upon me. He was seeking, he told me, from some good Samaritan of an officer, a free convoy to Madras as his servant; and as I happened to be in a position entitled to passes for some three or four followers at government expense, I was enabled to pour oil and wine into Sam’s wounds, and without even the disbursement to mine host the assistant-quartermaster-general, of the traditional ‘tuppence,’ to get him across from terminus to terminus—some four hundred long miles—and without once casting eyes on him. But at Lucifer’s hotel in Madras where I stayed—— What a memory of mosquitoes, fleas, and other nimble insects doth it bring! What a night-band of croaking frogs and howling jackals it kept! What packs of prowling pariah dogs and daringly thieving crows congregated about its yards and outhouses! What repulsive nude mendicants and fakeers strolled almost into its very verandahs! What a staff of lazy sweepers, slow-footed ‘boys,’ and sleepy punkah-pullers crawled about it generally! And last, though not least, what a wretched ‘coolie-cook’ superintended its flesh-pots, from which not even the every-day stereotyped prawn curry, boiled seer-fish, and grilled morghee (fowl) could creditably and palatably issue. At this Stygian caravanserai then, Sam, whom I thought I had bid adieu to for ever and a day on the railway platform, turns up again clean and smirk, salaams, asks for permanent employment, produces a thick packet of highly laudatory characters (mostly, I had no doubt, either fabricated by a native scribe in the Thieves’ Bazaar at Black Town, or borrowed for the occasion from some other brother-butler), gets engaged; and from that moment, both figuratively and literally, begins to eat my salt. Nor did the saline feasting fail to give him a taste for liquor—for alcoholic, decidedly alcoholic were Sam’s proclivities. He drank at all times and in all places; but his favourite day and locality was Tuesday, at the weekly market of the cantonment. Then and there he imbibed right royally, and staggering home—the coolies with the supplies following him as tipsy as himself—went straight to his mat-spread charpoy (bedstead).
‘Hollo, Sam!’ I exclaim; ‘at it again; drunk as usual from shandy [market].’
‘No, shar! Dis time no shrunk! Shun too mush hot! Splenshy head pain gib! Too mush make shake, sthagger, shar! No, mash-err, no! Sham not shrunk! Plenty shick! Shmall glass brandy—all right, shar!’
But I decline to add ‘the sum of more to that which hath too much,’ and I leave Sam to sober himself as he best can, and which, truth to say, he quickly does.
In the way of intoxicants nothing came amiss to my man’s unfastidious palate. He had no particular ‘wanity,’ like Old Weller’s friend the red-nosed Shepherd: Henneysey’s brandy, Kinahan’s whisky, Boord’s gin, Bass’s ale, Guinness’s stout, champagne, sherry, claret—all and each were equally acceptable; and failing these European liquors, then the vile palm-toddy and killing mango-spirit of the neighbouring native stills supplied their place. Bar the toddy and mango stuff, which were cheap and easily obtained, Sam did not disburse much for his wine-cellar; master’s sideboard and stores, guard them as he would, came cheaper and handier. Every bottle, somehow or other, got ‘other lips’ than mine and my friends’ applied to it, and its contents went into and warmed other ‘hollow hearts’ than ours. Sam laid an embargo on and helped himself from all. He it is, I fancy, to whom Aliph Cheem alludes in his Lay of Ind entitled The Faithful Abboo, that trusty servant who, habitually stealing his master’s liquor, and accusing his brother-domestics, got caught and half-poisoned by mistaking in his prowls Kerosine for Old Tom. A misadventure not unlike befell Sam; but in that instance he did not ‘strike oil,’ but came upon a very nauseating dose of tartar emetic, and was ‘plenty sick’ and ‘plenty shame’ for some hours after.
Another predilection of my factotum’s was tobacco, which he smoked without ceasing, and without the least regard to quality or fabric. ‘Long-cut or short-cut’ to him ‘were all the same.’ But as I did not happen to be addicted to the ‘nicotian weed’ Sam could not draw on any resources of mine, but had to depend on his own means, supplemented by the surreptitious abstraction of Trichys and Manillas, of Latakia and Bird’s-eye, from the boxes and pouches of my chum and visitors.
Every native gambles; so it could hardly be expected that Sam should differ from his brethren in this respect. In the words of the old ditty anent Ally Croker: