Part 97 (1/2)
”Thanks--a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To think that a man should so shamelessly.... Infamous liquor, too. Ovid in exile drank no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas! I had no ice. Good night. I would introduce you to my wife were I sober--or she civilized.”
A native woman came out of the darkness of the room, and began calling the man names; so I went away. He was the most interesting loafer that I had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later on, he became a friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man fearfully shaken with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the thirty-five which, he said, was his real age. When a man begins to sink in India, and is not sent Home by his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low from a respectable point of view. By the time that he changes his creed, as did McIntosh, he is past redemption.
In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs, generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to know them. As McIntosh himself used to say:--”If I change my religion for my stomach's sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am I anxious for notoriety.”
At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me. ”Remember this. I am not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your food, nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books which you may not specially value. It is more than likely that I shall sell them for bottles of excessively filthy country-liquors. In return, you shall share such hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy on which two can sit, and it is possible that there may, from time to time, be food in that platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on the premises at any hour: and thus I make you welcome to all my poor establishments.”
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 cla.s.sical attainments, or your excruciating quant.i.ties, 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 fas.h.i.+on, you would know what the Spanish Monk meant when he said--
'I the Trinity ill.u.s.trate, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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:--
”It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I fore-gathered with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in cookery.”
He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was not pretty to look at.
McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall.
He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had descended--a Virgil in the Shades, he said--and that, in return for my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.
”Man,” said he, ”when you have reached the uttermost depths of degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the G.o.ds; but I make no doubt that my b.e.s.t.i.a.l body was writhing down here in the garbage.”
”You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean,” I said.
”I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose b.u.t.tery-hatch you have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the lowest--always supposing each degree extreme.”
He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and continued:--
”On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the G.o.ds, knowing good and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not?”
When a man has lost the warning of ”next morning's head,” he must be in a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the insensibility good enough.
”For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most enviable. Think of my consolations!”