No More Learning

Impossible to mistake
the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I
shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvelously like that of a fast
game.

Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.

"This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the Presence was
disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the
bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it
was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people!
What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to
go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is
sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man! "

Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for
rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the
big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir
Baksh has no notions of morality.

There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his
head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation,
in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib's tragic death in
three separate stations--two of them fifty miles away. The third shift
was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dogcart.
If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through
Bengal with his corpse.

I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while
the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong
"hundred and fifty up. " Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped,
and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of
it.

That was the bitterest thought of all!




THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES

Alive or dead-there is no other way.
--Native Proverb.

THERE is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale. Jukes by
accident stumbled upon a village that is well known to exist, though
he is the only Englishman who has been there. A somewhat similar
institution used to flourish on the outskirts of Calcutta, and there is
a story that if you go into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart
of the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across not a village but a
town where the Dead who did not die but may not live have established
their headquarters. And, since it is perfectly true that in the same
Desert is a wonderful city where all the rich money lenders retreat
after they have made their fortunes (fortunes so vast that the owners
cannot trust even the strong hand of the Government to protect them,
but take refuge in the waterless sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring
barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces with gold
and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-of-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's
tale should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans
and distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take
the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his
legitimate work. He never varies the tale in the telling, and grows
very hot and indignant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment
he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but he has
since touched it up in places and introduced Moral Reflections, thus:

In the beginning it all arose from a slight attack of fever.