No More Learning

The landlord had repainted it when
Strickland took the bungalow, and unless you knew how Indian bungalows
were built you would never have suspected that above the cloth lay the
dark, three-cornered cavern of the roof, where the beams and the under
side of the thatch harbored all manner of rats, hats, ants, and other
things.

Tietjens met me in the veranda with a bay like the boom of the bells of
St. Paul's, and put her paws on my shoulders and said she was glad to
see me. Strickland had contrived to put together that sort of meal which
he called lunch, and immediately after it was finished went out about
his business. I was left alone with Tietjens and my own affairs. The
heat of the summer had broken up and given place to the warm damp of
the rains. There was no motion in the heated air, but the rain fell like
bayonet rods on the earth, and flung up a blue mist where it splashed
back again. The bamboos and the custard apples, the poinsettias and
the mango-trees in the garden stood still while the warm water lashed
through them, and the frogs began to sing among the aloe hedges. A
little before the light failed, and when the rain was at its worst, I
sat in the back veranda and heard the water roar from the eaves, and
scratched myself because I was covered with the thing they called
prickly heat. Tietjens came out with me and put her head in my lap, and
was very sorrowful, so I gave her biscuits when tea was ready, and I
took tea in the back veranda on account of the little coolness I
found there. The rooms of the house were dark behind me. I could smell
Strickland's saddlery and the oil on his guns, and I did not the least
desire to sit among these things. My own servant came to me in the
twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tightly to his drenched
body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some
one. Very much against my will, and because of the darkness of the
rooms, I went into the naked drawing-room, telling my man to bring the
lights. There might or might not have been a caller in the room--it
seems to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows, but when the
lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without and
the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.
I explained to my man
that he was no wiser than he ought to be, and went back to the veranda
to talk to Tietjens. She had gone out into the wet and I could hardly
coax her back to me--even with biscuits with sugar on top. Strickland
rode back, dripping wet, just before dinner, and the first thing he said
was:

"Has any one called? "

I explained, with apologies, that my servant had called me into the
drawing-room on a false alarm; or that some loafer had tried to call
on Strickland, and, thinking better of it, fled after giving his name.
Strickland ordered dinner without comment, and since it was a real
dinner, with white tablecloth attached, we sat down.

At nine o'clock Strickland wanted to go to bed, and I was tired too.
Tietjens, who had been lying underneath the table, rose up and went into
the least exposed veranda as soon as her master moved to his own room,
which was next to the stately chamber set apart for Tietjens. If a mere
wife had wished to sleep out-of-doors in that pelting rain, it would not
have mattered, but Tietjens was a dog, and therefore the better animal.
I looked at Strickland, expecting to see him flog her with a whip. He
smiled queerly, as a man would smile after telling some hideous domestic
tragedy. "She has done this ever since I moved in here. "

The dog was Strickland's dog, so I said nothing, but I felt all that
Strickland felt in being made light of. Tietjens encamped outside my
bedroom window, and storm after storm came up, thundered on the thatch,
and died away. The lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg spattered
a barn door, but the light was pale blue, not yellow; and looking
through my slit bamboo blinds, I could see the great dog standing, not
sleeping, in the veranda, the hackles alift on her back, and her feet
planted as tensely as the drawn wire rope of a suspension bridge. In the
very short pauses of the thunder I tried to sleep, but it seemed that
some one wanted me very badly. He, whoever he was, was trying to call
me by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.