India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native woman
ran into the Serai among the horses, and screamed and beat her breasts;
for she had loved him.
Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there was
nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.
The papers were in a hopeless muddle.
Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was either
an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the former. One of
these days, you may be able to judge for yourselves. The bundle needed
much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense, at the head of the
chapters, which has all been cut out.
If the thing is ever published, some one may perhaps remember this story,
now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and not I
myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.
I don't want the _Giant's Robe_ to come true in my case.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
"Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy."
The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to
follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances
which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I
have still to be brother to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship
with what might have been a veritable King and was promised the reversion
of a Kingdom--army, law-courts, revenue and policy all complete. But,
to-day, I greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must
go and hunt it for myself.
The beginning of everything was in a railway train upon the road to Mhow
from Ajmir. There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated
traveling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class,
but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in
the Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which
is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or
Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not
patronize refreshment-rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots,
and buy sweets from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the roadside
water. That is why in the hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the
carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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