British -- India -- Fiction; India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction; Short stories, English
About seven minutes later, there was a wild hurroosh at the Club. A
sais, with a blanket and head-rope, was asking all the men he knew: “For
Heaven's sake lend me decent clothes!” As the men did not recognize him,
there were some peculiar scenes before Strickland could get a hot bath,
with soda in it, in one room, a shirt here, a collar there, a pair
of trousers elsewhere, and so on. He galloped off, with half the Club
wardrobe on his back, and an utter stranger's pony under him, to the
house of old Youghal. The General, arrayed in purple and fine linen, was
before him. What the General had said Strickland never knew, but Youghal
received Strickland with moderate civility; and Mrs. Youghal, touched
by the devotion of the transformed Dulloo, was almost kind. The General
beamed, and chuckled, and Miss Youghal came in, and almost before old
Youghal knew where he was, the parental consent had been wrenched out
and Strickland had departed with Miss Youghal to the Telegraph Office
to wire for his kit. The final embarrassment was when an utter stranger
attacked him on the Mall and asked for the stolen pony.
So, in the end, Strickland and Miss Youghal were married, on the strict
understanding that Strickland should drop his old ways, and stick to
Departmental routine, which pays best and leads to Simla. Strickland
was far too fond of his wife, just then, to break his word, but it was
a sore trial to him; for the streets and the bazars, and the sounds in
them, were full of meaning to Strickland, and these called to him to
come back and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I
will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long
since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would
call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the
marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a
man would master, he must always continue to learn.
But he fills in his Departmental returns beautifully.
YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER.
I am dying for you, and you are dying for another.
Punjabi Proverb.
When the Gravesend tender left the P. & O. steamer for Bombay and went
back to catch the train to Town, there were many people in it crying.
But the one who wept most, and most openly was Miss Agnes Laiter. She
had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved--or ever could
love, so she said--was going out to India; and India, as every one
knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and
sepoys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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