His curiosity would have been satisfied had he seen
Dan Grady, discredited regimental conspirator, trying
to explain to his thirsty comrades in India the non-arrival
of funds from New York.
Your Gods and my Gods-do you or I know which are the
stronger? Native Proverb.
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of
Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to
the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the
Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional
and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary
horrors of life in India: it may be stretched
to explain my story.
My friend Strickland of the Police, who knows as much
of natives of India as is good for any man, can bear
witness to the facts of the case. Dumoise, our
doctor, also saw what Strickland and I saw. The
inference which he drew from the evidence was entirely
incorrect. He is dead now; he died, in a rather
curious manner, which has been elsewhere described.
When Fleete came to India he owned a little money
and some land in the Himalayas, near a place called
Dharmsala. Both properties had been left him
by an uncle, and he came out to finance them.
He was a big, heavy, genial, and inoffensive man.
His knowledge of natives was, of course, limited,
and he complained of the difficulties of the language.
He rode in from his place in the hills to spend New
Year in the station, and he stayed with Strickland.
On New Year’s Eve there was a big dinner at
the club, and the night was excusably wet. When
men foregather from the uttermost ends of the Empire,
they have a right to be riotous. The Frontier
had sent down a contingent o’ Catch-’em-Alive-O’s
who had not seen twenty white faces for a year, and
were used to ride fifteen miles to dinner at the next
Fort at the risk of a Khyberee bullet where their
drinks should lie. They profited by their new
security, for they tried to play pool with a curled-up
hedgehog found in the garden, and one of them carried
the marker round the room in his teeth. Half a
dozen planters had come in from the south and were
talking ‘horse’ to the Biggest Liar in
Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once.
Everybody was there, and there was a general closing
up of ranks and taking stock of our losses in dead
or disabled that had fallen during the past year.
It was a very wet night, and I remember that we sang
‘Auld Lang Syne’ with our feet in the Polo
Championship Cup, and our heads among the stars, and
swore that we were all dear friends. Then some
of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to
open up the Soudan and were opened up by Fuzzies in
that cruel scrub outside Suakim, and some found stars
and medals, and some were married, which was bad,
and some did other things which were worse, and the
others of us stayed in our chains and strove to make
money on insufficient experiences.
