No More Learning

In a moment I had let go Pornic's
head, and irritated beyond expression at the morning's adventure,
commenced cuffing those nearest to me with all the force I could. The
wretches dropped under my blows like nine-pins, and the laughter gave
place to wails for mercy; while those yet untouched clasped me round the
knees, imploring me in all sorts of uncouth tongues to spare them.

In the tumult, and just when I was feeling very much ashamed of myself
for having thus easily given way to my temper, a thin, high voice
murmured in English from behind my shoulder: "--Sahib! Sahib! Do you not
know me? Sahib, it is Gunga Dass, the telegraph-master. "

I spun round quickly and faced the speaker.

Gunga Dass, (I have, of course, no hesitation in mentioning the man's
real name) I had known four years before as a Deccanee Brahmin loaned by
the Punjab Government to one of the Khalsia States. He was in charge
of a branch telegraph-office there, and when I had last met him was
a jovial, full-stomached, portly Government servant with a marvelous
capacity for making had puns in English--a peculiarity which made
me remember him long after I had forgotten his services to me in his
official capacity. It is seldom that a Hindu makes English puns.

Now, however, the man was changed beyond all recognition. Caste-mark,
stomach, slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone.
I looked at a withered skeleton, turban-less and almost naked, with long
matted hair and deep-set codfish-eyes.

But for a crescent-shaped scar on the left cheek--the result of an
accident for which I was responsible I should never have known him.
But it was indubitably Gunga Dass, and--for this I was thankful--an
English-speaking native who might at least tell me the meaning of all
that I had gone through that day.
The crowd retreated to some distance as I turned toward the miserable
figure, and ordered him to show me some method of escaping from the
crate. He held a freshly plucked crow in his hand, and in reply to my
question climbed slowly on a platform of sand which ran in front of
the holes, and commenced lighting a fire there in silence. Dried bents,
sand-poppies, and driftwood burn quickly; and I derived much consolation
from the fact that he lit them with an ordinary sulphur-match. When they
were in a bright glow, and the crow was neatly spitted in front thereof,
Gunga Dass began without a word of preamble:

"There are only two kinds of men, Sar. The alive and the dead. When you
are dead you are dead, but when you are alive you live. " (Here the crow
demanded his attention for an instant as it twirled before the fire in
danger of being burned to a cinder. ) "If you die at home and do not die
when you come to the ghat to be burned you come here. "

The nature of the reeking village was made plain now, and all that I had
known or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the fact
just communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first
landed in Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the
existence, somewhere in India, of a place to which such Hindus as had
the misfortune to recover from trance or catalepsy were conveyed and
kept, and I recollect laughing heartily at what I was then pleased to
consider a traveler's tale.

Sitting at the bottom of the sand-trap, the memory of Watson's Hotel,
with its swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants, and the sallow-faced
Armenian, rose up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and I burst
into a loud fit of laughter. The contrast was too absurd!

Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean bird, watched me curiously.
Hindus seldom laugh, and his surroundings were not such as to move Gunga
Dass to any undue excess of hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly
from the wooden spit and as solemnly devoured it. Then he continued his
story, which I give in his own words:

"In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burned almost before
you are dead.