THE WAYS OF THE HINDU
It was my good fortune to find employment the next morning. The job was
suggestive of the spy and the tattle-tale, but the most indolent of
vagabonds could not have dreamed of a more ideal means of amassing a
fortune. I had merely to sit still and do nothing—and draw three rupees
a day for doing it. Almost the only condition imposed upon me was that
the sitting must be done on a street car.
Let me explain. The electric tramways of the city of Madras are numerous
and well-patronized. The company does not dare to entrust the position
on the front platform to aborigines; for in case of emergency the Hindu
has a remarkable faculty of being anywhere but at his post, and of doing
anything but the right thing. But as conductor, a native or Eurasian of
some slight education does as well as a real man. He has only to poke
the pice and annas into the cash register he wears about his neck and
punch and deliver a ticket. Yet it is surprising, nay, sad, to find how
many accidents befall him while engaged in this simple task. He will
forget, for instance, to give the passenger the ticket that is his
receipt for fare paid; coppers will cling tenaciously to his fingers in
spite of his best efforts to dislodge them; he has even been known, in
his absent-mindedness, to overlook his friends on his tour of collection
through the car. Don’t, for a moment, fancy that he is dishonest. It is
merely because he is a Hindu and was born that way.
To correct these unimportant little faults, the corporation has a force
of inspectors, occasionally sahibs, commonly Eurasians, clad in khaki
uniforms and armed with report pads, who spring out unexpectedly from
obscure side streets to offer expert assistance to passing conductors.
But, of course, mathematical experts do not dodge in and out of the
sun-baked alleyways of Madras for the good of their health. The spirit
of India is sure to attack them sooner or later, even if it has not been
with them since birth. Cases of friendship between inspectors and
conductors are not unknown, and it is not the way of the Oriental to
attempt to reduce his friend’s income. In short, the auditors must be
audited, and, all unknown to them or its other servants, the corporation
employs a small select band of men who do _not_ wear uniforms, and who
do _not_ line up before the wicket on pay day.
It was by merest chance that I learned of this state of affairs and
found my way to a small office that no one would have suspected of being
in any way connected with the transportation system of Madras. An
Englishman who was ostensibly a private broker deemed my answers to his
cross-examination satisfactory, and I was initiated at once into the
mysterious masonry of inspector of inspectors. The broker warned me not
to build hopes of an extended engagement, rather to anticipate an early
dismissal; for the uniformed employés were famed for lynx-eyed
vigilance, and my usefulness to the company, obviously, could not endure
beyond the few days that might elapse before I was “spotted.” He did not
add that a longer period might give me opportunity to form too intimate
acquaintances, but he wore the air of a man who had not exhausted his
subject.
My duties began forthwith. The Englishman supplied me with a handful of
coppers that were to return to the corporation through its cash
registers. I was to board a tramway, find place of observation in a back
seat, and pay my fare as an ordinary passenger. The distance I should
travel on each car, the routes I should follow, my changes from one line
to another, were left to my own discretion. Upon alighting, I was to
stroll far enough away from the line to allay suspicion and return to
hail another car. The company required only that I make out each
evening, in the private office, a report of my observations, with the
numbers of the cars, and sign a statement to the effect that I had
devoted the eight hours to the interests of the corporation. What could
have been more entirely mon affaire? If there was a nook or corner of
Madras that I did not visit during the few days that followed, it was
not within strolling distance of any streetcar line.
Among the sights of the city must be noted her human bullocks. Horses
are rare in Madras. The transportation of freight falls to a company of
leather-skinned, rice-fed coolies whose strength and endurance pass
belief. Their carts are massive, two-wheeled vehicles, as cumbersome as
ever burdened a yoke of oxen. The virtues of axle-grease they know not,
and through the streets of Madras resounds a droning as of the Egyptian
sakkas on the plain of Thebes. Yet two of these emaciated creatures will
drag a wagon, laden with great bales from the ships, or a dozen steel
rails, for miles over hills and hollows, with fewer breathing spells
than a truckman would allow a team of horses.
My devotion to corporate interests brought me the surprise supreme of my
Oriental wanderings. At the corner of the Maidan, where the tramway
swings round towards the harbor, a gang of coolies was repairing the
roadway. That, in itself, was no cause for wonder. But among the
workmen, dressed like the others in a ragged loin-cloth, swinging his
rammer as stolidly, gazing as abjectly at the ground as his companions,
was a white man! There could be no doubt of it. Under the tan of an
Indian sun his skin was as fair as a Norseman’s, his shock of unkempt
hair was a fiery red, and his eyes were blue! But a white man ramming
macadam! A sahib so unmindful of his high origin as to join the ranks of
the most miserable, the most debased, the most abhorred of human
creatures! To become a sudra and ram macadam in the public streets,
dressed in a clout! Here was the final, lasciate ogni speranza end. A
terror came upon me, a longing to flee while yet there was time, from
the blighted land in which a man of my own flesh and blood could fall to
this.
Again and again my rounds of the city brought me back to the corner of
the Maidan. The renegade toiled stolidly on, bending dejectedly over his
task, never raising his head to glance at the passing throng. Twice I
was moved to alight and speak, to learn his dreadful story, but the car
had rumbled on before I gathered courage. Leaving the broker’s office as
twilight fell, I passed that way again. A babu loitering on the curb
drew me into conversation and I put a question to him.
“What! That?” he said, following the direction of my finger. “Why,
that’s a Hindu albino.”
I turned away to an eating-shop, the proprietor of which had long since
alienated his fellow-countrymen by professing conversion to
Christianity, and sat down for supper. It was the official “bums’
retreat” of Madras. A half-dozen white wanderers were gathered. I looked
for Marten among them; but he had found pleasure, evidently, in the
company of his chocolate-colored cousins, and when the last yarn was
spun he had not put in an appearance. I stepped out again into the night
to find a lodging.
Had I imagined that I alone, of all Madras, was planning to sleep
beneath the stars, I should have been doomed to disappointment. For an
hour I roamed the city, seeking a bit of open space. If there was a
passageway or a platband too small to accommodate a coolie or a street
urchin, it was occupied by a mongrel cur. The night was black. There was
danger of running upon some huddled family in the darkness, and the
pollution of touch might prove mutual. I left the close-packed town
behind and struck off across the Maidan. Here was room and to spare; but
the law forbade, and if officers did not enforce the ordinance, sneak
thieves did—Hindu thieves who can travel on their bellies faster than an
honest man can walk, making less noise than the gentle southern breeze,
and steal the teeth from a sleeper’s mouth and the eyes from under his
lids ere he wakes. I kept on, stumbling over a knoll now and then,
falling flat in a dry ditch, and fetching up against a fence. Groping
along it, I came upon the highway that leads southward along the shore
of the sea. A furlong beyond was a grove of high trees, with
wide-spreading branches, like the pine; and beneath them soft beach
sand. I halted there. A landward breeze had tempered the oppressive
heat; the boughs above whispered hoarsely together. At regular intervals
through the night, the sepulchral voice of the Bay of Bengal spoke
faintly across the barren strand.
When I awoke, it was broad daylight, and Sunday. The day of rest brings
small change to the teeming hordes of India, but conductors and
inspectors were permitted to whisper together unobserved, and I took
advantage of the holiday to put my wardrobe in the hands of a _dhoby_. A
dhoby, in any language but Hindustanee, is a laundryman. But the word
fails dismally as a translation. Within those two syllables lurks a
volume of meaning to the sahib who has dwelt in the land of India. The
editors of Anglo-Indian newspapers, who may only write and endure, are
undecided whether to style him a fiend or a raving maniac. Youthful
philosophers and poets, grown eloquent under the inspiration of a newly
returned basket, fill more columns than the reporter of the viceroy’s
council.
For the dhoby is a man of energy. High above his head, like a flail, he
swings each streaming garment and brings it down on his flat stone as if
his principal desire in life were to split it to bits. Not once, but as
long as strength endures, and when he can swing no more he flings down
the tog and jumps fiendishly upon it. His bare feet tread a wild
Terpsichorean orgie, and when he can dance no longer he falls upon the
unoffending rag and tugs and strains and twists and pulls, as though
determined that it shall come to be washed no more. Flying buttons are
his glee. If he can reduce the garment to the component parts in which
the maker cut it, his joy is complete. When the power to beat and tramp
and tug fails him, he tosses the shreds disdainfully into the stream or
cistern and attacks the wardrobe of another helpless client. Yet he is
strictly honest. At nightfall he bears back to its owner the dirt he
carried away, and the threads that hold it together. When all other
words of vituperation seem weak and insipid, the Anglo-Indian calls his
enemy a dhoby.
The cook of the rendezvous offered, for three annas, to wash all that I
owned, save my shoes and the inner workings of my pith helmet. In a more
commonplace land the possessor of a single suit would have been
bedridden until the task was done. But not in India. A large
handkerchief was ample attire within the “bums’ retreat.” The
beachcombers gathered in the dining-room saw in the costume cause for
envy, not ridicule; for few could boast of as much when wash-day came
for them, and the hours that might have been spent under sheets and
blankets in a sterner clime passed quickly in the writing of letters.
From the back yard, for a time, came the shrieks of maltreated garments.
Then all fell silent. In fear and trembling, I ventured forth to take
inventory of my indispensable raiment. But as a dhoby the cook was a
bungler. There were a few rents in the gear arrayed on the eaves gutter,
a button was missing here and there, and there was no evidence of snowy
whiteness. But every garment could still be easily identified, and an
hour with a ship’s needle, when the blazing sun had done its work,
sufficed to heal the wounds, though not the scars, of combat.
Not a word of Haywood had reached me since the police station had
swallowed him up. Evidently he was still forcibly separated from
society; but had he escaped with a light sentence or fallen victim to
“five years of the lock-step?” When my Monday report had been filed, I
set out to find the answer to that question. Such cases, they told me,
were tried at a court in a distant section of the city. Its officials
knew nothing of the New Yorker however, and I tramped to the suburban
station where the “crime” had been committed. Inquiry seemed futile. The
vendor was there, as blithesome as ever, and his bananas were hoary with
age, but the fourteen words of Hindustanee I had picked up were those he
did not know. The policeman on the platform had heard some discussion of
the case, but had no definite information to offer. Then came the relief
squad, and the officer who had made the arrest directed me to another
distant court.
There were several buildings of judicial aspect scattered over the great
campus, but they were closed for the night. The door of a hut, such as
servants dwell in, stood ajar, and I entered. A high-caste native was
gathering together books and papers from the desk of a miniature court
room. I made known my errand.
“Haywood?” answered the Hindu, “Ah! Yes, I know about him. I know _all_
about him, for he was tried before me.”
The New Yorker had swallowed his pride, indeed, to consent to being
tried by a “nigger” rather than to come into contact with white
officers.
“And what did you hand him?” I ventured.
The justice, striving to appear at ease in a pompous dignity that was as
much too large for him as the enormous blue and white turban that
bellied out above his thin face like an un-reefed mainsail in a stiff
breeze, chose a ledger from the desk and turned over the leaves.
“Ah, here it is,” he exclaimed, pointing out an entry; “Richard Haywood,
Englishman. Charge, assault. Found in his possession, four annas, three
pice, one pocketknife, one pipe, three cigarettes, two buttons.” They
were nothing if not exact, but they had overlooked one of the uses of
the bands on pith helmets. “Plea, guilty. Sentence, five rupees fine.
Prisoner alleging indigence, sentence was changed to one week in the
Presidency jail.”
“Suppose I pay his fine?” I asked. “Will he be released at once?”
“Yes, but the case has passed out of my jurisdiction. You must pay it to
the warden.”
No sojourner in Madras need make inquiry for the great white building
that houses her felons. I reached it in time to find the massive gate
still unlocked and gained admittance to the warden’s office. He denied
my request for an interview with Haywood, however, on the ground that
prisoners for so brief a period were not allowed visitors. I opened my
mouth to mention the fine, then stopped. Perhaps the New Yorker had some
secret reason for choosing to swelter seven days in an Indian prison. If
he was anxious to be free, he had only to take down his hat and, like
the magician, produce from it the money that would set him at liberty. I
resolved to run no risk of upsetting subtle plans, and turned back into
the city.
Two days later, the broker confided to me the sad news that I had been
“spotted.” Marten, who had joined me in the grove lodging, the night
before, proposed to apply at once to the secretary of the Friend-in-Need
Society for a ticket northward. Eager to investigate the Home which the
society operates in Madras, I accompanied him. The secretary was an
English magistrate who held court in a building facing the harbor. The
court room was crowded to suffocation. While we waited for the native
policeman to return with an answer to our note I caught enough of the
interpreter’s words to learn that the perspiring Briton under the
punkahs was weighing the momentous question of the damages due a
shopkeeper for temporary loss of caste.
The attaché, after long absence, brought the information that the trial
was at its climax and that he dared not disturb proceedings. But Marten,
familiar with the “ropes” of official India, snorted in disgust and led
the way down a passage that brought us to an anteroom behind the
judgment seat. Beckoning to me to follow, he pushed aside the officers
who would have barred our progress, and marched boldly into the court
room, halting before the stenographer’s table. I anticipated immediate
imprisonment for contempt of court; but the magistrate, eager, as who
would not have been, for a moment’s relief from native hair-splitting,
signed to the interpreter to stay the case, and, sliding down in his
daïs until he was all but lying on his back, bade us step up beside him.
Marten, who had transferred to Calcutta the phantom ship he was
pursuing, applied for a through ticket; I, for admission to the Society
Home.
“I’ll give you both a chit to the manager for to-night,” said the
justice, when we had spun our yarns. “The Home is rather overcrowded,
but we always try to find a place for Englishmen, even if we can’t
accommodate all the Germans, Italians, and Turks that turn up.”
“But we’re not Englishmen,” I put in.
“Nonsense,” yawned the judge. “When I say Englishmen of course I include
Americans, but as to you”—he turned to Marten—“I can’t give you a ticket
to Calcutta. That’s more than a thousand miles. I’ll have the manager
ship you to Vizagapatam in the morning. That is half way, and the
commissioner there will send you on.”
He made out the notes and we departed. As we passed the street entrance,
the corpulent babu was again pouring forth the woes of the polluted
plaintiff.
But for a sign over the entrance, the Home might have been taken for the
estate of an English gentleman of modest income. The grounds were
extensive and well-wooded. The gate was guarded by a lodge, beyond which
the Home itself, a low, rambling bungalow, peeped through the trees. A
score of vagabonds, burned brown in face and garb, loitered in the shade
along the curb. Half were Eurasians. There is no more irreclaimable
vagrant under the sun’s rays than the tropical half-breed when once he
joins the fraternity of the Great Unwashed. Reputation or personal
appearance are to him matters of utter indifference. A threadbare jacket
and trousers—sad commentaries of the willfulness of the dhoby—mark his
social superiority to the coolie; but he goes barefooted by choice,
often bareheaded, and in his abhorrence of unnecessary activity is as
truly a Hindu as his maternal ancestor. Like the native, too, he is
indifferent to bodily affliction—so it bring no pain—and laughs at
encroaching disease as though he shared with the Brahmin the conviction
that his present form is only one of hundreds that he will inhabit.
At our arrival a youth of this class was entertaining the assembled
wanderers with a spicy tale. His language was the lazy, half-enunciated
English of the tropical hybrid, and he chuckled with glee as often as
his companions. Yet he was a victim of the dread “elephantiasis” so
common among natives. His left foot and leg below the knee were swollen
to four times their natural size, and to accommodate the abnormal limb
his trouser leg was split to the thigh. As the gate opened, he rose and
dragged his incurable affliction with him, leaving in the sand
footprints like the nest of a mongrel cur.
The manager was a bullet-headed Irishman, chosen, like many another, for
his knowledge of the wily ways of the vagrant, gleaned in many a year
“on the road.” The Home, though more ambitious in its scope, resembled
the Asile Rudolph of Cairo. The meals, consisting of native food, were
served in the same generous portions, and the cots, in spite of the
unconventional habits of the inmates, were as scrupulously clean.
Adjoining the quarters of the transient guests, the society provided a
permanent home for aged and crippled beachcombers. We sat late under the
veranda, listening to strange tales of the road of earlier days from a
score of old cronies who quarreled for a pinch of tobacco and wept when
their words were discredited. Sad fate, indeed, for those who, in the
years of their strength and inspiration, had made the world their
playground, to be sentenced thus to end their days in the meager bit of
space to which sightless eyes or paralyzed limbs confined them, while
they wandered on in spirit over boundless seas and trackless land.
Early the next morning the manager led the way to the Beach station and,
having supplied Marten with a ticket to Vizagapatam and a day’s
“batter,” bade us bon voyage. The journey was long; it might also have
been uneventful but for my companion’s incorrigible longing to annoy his
fellow-beings. The weak point in Marten’s make-up was his head. Years
before, during his days before the mast, he had gone ashore in a
disreputable port after paying off from a voyage of several months’
duration and, overladen with good cheer, had been so successfully
sand-bagged that he not only lost his earnings but emerged from the
encounter with a broken head. At the hospital it was found necessary to
trepan his skull. But the metal plate had proved a poor substitute for
sound bone; and the ex-pearl-fisher was wont to warn every new
acquaintance to beware “horse-play,” as a blow on the head might result
in serious injury.
The favorite occupation of the Hindu on his travels is sleeping. If
there is an alien voyager in his compartment he sits stiffly in his
place, on guard against a loss of caste. When his companions are all of
his own class, he stretches out on his back and slumbers, open-mouthed,
like a dead fish. But the benches are short. The native, therefore,
seeks relief by sticking his feet out the window. An Indian train
bristles from engine to guard-van with bare, brown legs that give it the
aspect of a battery of small guns.
Our express had halted, late in the afternoon, on a switch beside a
train southward bound. Marten, chancing to have a straw in his
possession, leaned out of the window and fell to tickling the soles of a
pair of protruding feet. Their owner was a sound sleeper. For several
moments he did not stir. As our train started, he awoke suddenly and
sprang up with so startling a whoop that my companion recoiled in
surprise and struck his head sharply on the top of the window.
The native was quickly avenged. For a moment his tormentor clung to the
casement, straining in every limb, then fell to the floor, writhing in
agony. Plainly he had lost consciousness, but he thrashed about the
compartment like a captive boa constrictor, twisting body and limbs in
racking contortions, and foaming at the mouth until his ashy face was
covered with spume, and dirt from the floor. His strength was
supernatural. To attempt to control him was useless,—forbidden, in fact,
on the day that he had warned me of his injury. I took refuge on one of
the benches to escape his convulsions.
The express sped on in the falling darkness. The next station was far
distant. Before me rose a vision of myself surrounded by stern officials
and attempting in vain to explain the presence of a corpse in my
compartment. Foolhardy, indeed, had I been to choose such a companion.
For a long hour his fit continued. Then the contortions of his body
diminished little by little; his arms and legs twitched spasmodically in
lessening jerks; his eyes, glassy and bloodshot, opened for a moment,
closed again, and he lay still. Through the interminable night he
stretched prone on the floor, motionless as a cadaver. When morning
broke in the east he sat up suddenly with a jest on his lips and none
the worse, apparently, for his ravings. But his memory retained no
record of occurrences from the moment when the wild shout of the Hindu
had sounded in his ears three hundred miles away.
An hour later we were purchasing sweetmeats in the bazaars of
Vizagapatam. The flat, sun-baked fields of southern India had been left
behind. The surrounding country was hilly and verdant; to the eastward
stretched the blue bay of Bengal. In the offing a ship lay at anchor.
Naked coolies, bent double under bales and bundles, waded waist-deep
into the sea and cast their burdens into a lighter. Adjoining the
bazaars, a sudra village of inhabited haycocks huddled together in a
valley. Before the huts men, women, and children crouched on their
haunches in the dust, their cadaverous knees on a level with their
sunken eyes, their fleshless talons clawing at scraps of half-putrid
food. Now and again they snarled at each other. More often they stared
away as vacantly as ruminating animals at the vista of squalor beyond.
Beside the village rose a barren rock, monument to the medley of
religions that inflict India. On its summit, within a space of little
more than an acre, commanding an outlook far out over the sea, stood a
Brahmin temple, a Mohammedan mosque, and a Christian church, each
reached by its own stairway cut in the perpendicular face of the rock.
Several miles separated the sudra village from the government buildings.
On the way native policemen and soldiers drew up at attention and
saluted as we passed. An entire squad, loitering before the central
station, fell quickly into ranks and stood stiffly at present-arms as
long as we remained in sight. In this English-governed land, the native
sees in every sahib a possible superior officer to whom it is safest to
be deferential.
We reached in due time the commissioner’s office. His only
representative in the deserted bureaus was an emaciated punkah-wallah,
turned watchman, who bowed his head in the dust before the door as
Marten addressed him.
“Nay, sahibs,” he murmured, “the commissioner sahib and the little
commissioners are absent, protectors of the miserable. To-day is the
Brahmin new year”—it was April thirteenth—“oh, charitable one, and a
holiday. The sahibs may come to-morrow. But nay! To-morrow is a feast of
the Mohammedans and a holiday also.”
“And the next day is Sunday,” I put in, when Marten had interpreted.
“The commissioner’s bungalow?” he demanded.
“In the forest beyond the hills,” murmured the coolie, pointing
northward. “Two cigarettes distant, oh, greatest of sahibs.”
To the grief of many a peregrinating beachcomber, the “appearances” of
the British governors of India are as rare as those of world-famed
tenors. We continued along a shimmering highway, winding among trees,
the dense shadows of which gave our eyes occasional relief, and a mile
beyond found the commissioner at home. Marten gained a hearing and
emerged with a note to the assistant commissioner. Once entangled in the
meshes of Oriental red-tape, there was no escape; and from midday till
late afternoon we raced back and forth through the streets and byways of
Vizagapatam, and routed out no fewer than twelve Hindu officials from
their holiday siestas. Even then my companion won a ticket only halfway
to the city on the Hoogly.
We caught the night express and reached Berhampore next morning. At his
bungalow, a youthful commissioner was so moved by Marten’s account of
the loss of his phantom ship—the story had lost nothing in frequent
repetitions—that he waived all legal formalities and gave him an order
on the station master for a ticket to his destination. Had he followed
the movements of the abandoned seaman for the rest of the day he might
have listened skeptically to the tale of the next wanderer to seek his
assistance.
On the shores of the Bay of Bengal, some two hundred miles south of the
capital and a day’s tramp from the main line, lies Puri, the city of
Juggernaut. I should have visited it alone had not Marten, utterly
indifferent to the suspense of his grieving shipmates, insisted on
accompanying me.
We alighted at Khurda Road and purchased tickets to the sacred city at a
price that could scarcely have covered the cost of printing. A train of
unusual length for a branch line was already so densely packed with
pilgrims that those who tumbled out of the compartment which the station
master chose to assign us were in imminent danger of being left behind.
Iron-voiced vendors danced about the platform. Their wares were the
usual greasy sweets, doughy bread-sheets and curried potatoes that had
been our fare for long days past. But this was “holy food,” prepared by
the priests of the hallowed city; for the Hindu on his pilgrimages to a
sacred shrine may not eat of worldly viands. For all that the hawkers
sold to us gladly, not abating, however, by a copper, the exorbitant
prices to which their monopoly and the superstitions of their regular
customers entitled them.
Night was falling when we descended at Puri. The station, as part of a
system abhorred of the gods of Hind, stood in the open country, a full
two miles from the sacred city. Not even the inhabitants of Benares are
more fanatical than those of Puri. Natives coming upon us in the
darkness along the road of sacrifice sprang aside in terror, and
shrieked a long-drawn “sahib hai!” to warn others to beware our
polluting touch. In the bazaars, many a merchant cried out in anger when
we approached his tumble-down shop; and only with much wheedling could
we draw one of them forth into the street to sell us sweetmeats and
fruits. Half the shacks were devoted to the sale of _dude_, which is to
say, milk—of bullocks and goats, of course, for the udders of the sacred
cow may not be violated. We paused at one to purchase. A vicious-faced
youth took our pice gingerly and filled two vessels much like
flowerpots. I emptied my own and stepped forward to replace it on the
worm-eaten board that served as counter. The youth sprang at me with a
scream of rage and fear, and, before the pot had touched the counter,
Marten knocked it out of my hand and shattered it to bits on the
cobblestones, then smashed his own beside it. The two pice I had paid
for the milk included the price of the vessel, great quantities of which
are made of the red clay of neighboring pits. The crash of pottery that
startled the silence of the night at frequent intervals were signs, not
of some sad accident, as I had supposed, but that a drinker had finished
his dude. The miserable, uneven streets were paved in fragments of
broken pots.
There was not a native hut in Puri that we could enter, much less sleep
in, and, our evening meal finished en marche, we returned to the station
and asked permission of the Eurasian agent to occupy two of the wicker
chairs in the waiting-room. He refused, not only because it was against
the rules, which didn’t matter, but because he was sure to be found out
if he disobeyed them. He knew of better quarters, however, and directed
us accordingly. We stumbled off through the railway yards and came upon
the first-class coach he had mentioned, on a deserted side track. It was
the best “hotel” of our Indian trip. The car was built on the lines of
the American Pullman, with great couches upholstered in soft leather.
There were burnished lamps that we could light with impunity when the
heavy curtains had been drawn, several large mirrors, and running water.
Small wonder if we slept late next morning and found it necessary to
reconnoiter a bit, for the sake of the station master’s reputation,
before making our exit.
[Illustration: The great road of Puri, over which the massive Juggernaut
car is drawn once a year]
The inventive genius of the Hindu has bedecked the dwelling of god
Juggernaut with that extravagance of barbaric splendor beloved of the
Oriental. Admittance is denied the sahib, but without is much to be
seen. The temple rises in seven domes, one above each of four stone
stairways deep-worn by centuries of pilgrim feet and knees, and three
within the crumbling, time-eaten wall. They are domes, though, only in
general outline. The Hindu strives for bizarre effects in his
architecture; he dreads, above all, plain surfaces. The smaller domes
rise en perron like the terraced vineyards of the Alps, the steps half
hidden under glittering ornamentations,—hideous-faced gods of many arms,
repulsive distortions of sacred animals, haggard, misshapen gargoyles.
Above them towers Juggernaut’s throne room, resembling a cucumber stood
on end and suggesting that its builder, starting with the dome as his
original conception, was loath to bring his creation to completion, and
pushed his walls onward and upward to a dizzy height, to end at last
abruptly in a flat cupola. Mayhap his despotic master had doomed him to
that fate which has so often befallen successful architects in the
Orient, of losing his hands when his masterpiece was completed.
Everywhere the temple bears witness to the ravages of time. The
splendors of earlier days are faded and crumbling; there hovers over all
not so much an air of neglect as of the inability of these groveling,
British-ruled descendants of the talented creators to arrest the decay,
an acknowledgment that the days of such constructions and the Hindus of
such days are passé.
Pilgrims swarm in Puri at all seasons. Our way through the narrow
streets was often barred by shrieking processions; a hundred pious
families had pitched their tents at the edge of the great road. But it
is in the month of July, when the bloodthirsty god makes his annual
excursion to a smaller temple two miles distant, that untold multitudes
pour in upon the wretched hamlet. The car, weighing many tons, is set up
outside the temple, and Juggernaut, amid the clamor of barbaric rites,
is placed on his throne therein. Hordes of natives eager to “acquire
merit” surge round the chariot, screaming and struggling in the frenzy
of fanaticism for a place at the long ropes, and, to the accompaniment
of weird incantations, the procession starts. The great road, scene in
bygone centuries of uncounted human sacrifices, stretches away straight
and level to the smaller temple. It is the most generous roadway in
India, fully a furlong wide, in reality a great plain, covered with
withered grass where the tramp of many feet has not worn it bare. A
thousand naked bodies, burnished by the blazing sunlight, strain like
demons at the ropes. As one falls, a hundred others surge forward to
fight for his place. The aged peasant to whom this pilgrimage has
dissipated the meager earnings of a lifetime, returns to his native
village with inner assurance of the favor of the gods in his next
existence if he can force his way through the rabble for one weak tug.
But the ponderous car moves slowly. A scanty rice diet is not conducive
to great physical strength, and the massive wheels cut deep into the
sandy plain. The ruts of the last journey, made nine months before, were
by no means obliterated at the time of our visit. Short as is the
distance between the two temples, the passing oftentimes endures a week;
and the struggle for places decreases day by day as those who have
performed their act of devotion turn homeward. The last fanatics drop
out one by one. The ropes lose their tautness and sag of their own
weight. A scanty remnant of the multitude gives a few “dry pulls”; and
the grim-visaged god completes his journey behind bands of coolies hired
for the occasion.
They sacrifice no more to Juggernaut. John Bull has scowled on the
custom. But the American superintendent of the mission hospital among
the trees at the roadside bore witness that the insatiate monster has
still a goodly quota of victims; for annually the plague breaks out
among the superstitious, devitalized pilgrims and leaves hundreds to die
on the flat, sandy coast like fish tossed ashore.
He who has journeyed through this strange land will be slow ever after
to look upon animals as devoid of intelligence and the power to reason.
Encircling the temple, we chanced upon one of her sacred bulls setting
forth on his morning rounds through the thatch-roofed bazaars that make
up the town of Puri. He was a sleek, plump beast, with short, stumpy
horns and a hump, as harmless, apparently, as a child’s pet poodle. We
kept him company, for, strange to say, the fanatics, who had all but
mobbed us for setting foot on the flagging before a temple gate, offered
no protest when we petted this most reverenced of animals. He was too
near the gods no doubt to be polluted even by a sahib touch.
[Illustration: The main entrance to Juggernaut’s temple in Puri. I was
mobbed for stepping on the flagging around the column]
Setting a course for the nearest shop, he advanced with dignified tread,
shouldering his way through the multitude, pushing aside all who stood
in his path, not rudely, but firmly, something almost human in his
manner, of waywardness, self-complacency, and arrogance. The
impoverished descendants of an ancient house would have marched with
that stately air of superiority, the son of a nouveau riche with that
attitude of primary proprietorship in the world and its goods. Native
reverence for the animal was little short of disgusting. Pilgrims
prostrated themselves before him; hawkers stepped aside with muttered
prayers; scores of women fell on their knees and elbows in the teeming
streets, bowed their heads low in the dust, and ran to kiss his flanks.
Marching boldly up to the first booth, the bull chose a morsel of green
stuff from the inclined platform, and, chewing it leisurely after the
manner of an epicure, strolled on to the next stall. In the days of his
novitiate, ’tis said, the sacred calf eats his fill of the first food he
comes upon. A few weeks of experience, however, make him discriminating
in his tastes. Through the long rows of shops the beast levied on all,
stopping longest where the supplies were freshest, and awaking a mild
protest from the keeper. It was only a protest, however; taking the form
of a chanted prayer. For how may the Hindu know that the soul of his
grandfather does not look out through those bovine eyes! At any rate, he
acquires merit for every leaf and stock that he loses. Now and again,
Marten interpreted a rogation.
“Hast thou not always had thy fill, oh, holy one!” prayed the native,
rocking his body back and forth in time to his chant, “I would willingly
feed thee. Hast thou not always found welcome at my shop? But I am a
poor man, O king of sacred beasts. I pray thee, therefore, take of the
goods of my neighbor, who is the possessor of great wealth. For my
poverty is extreme, and if thou dost not desist, to-morrow may I not be
here to feed thee.”
As if in answer to the prayer, the animal moved on to the booth of the
neighbor, who bore no outward sign, at least, of the great wealth that
had been charged against him. His stock was fresh, however, and the bull
ate generously in spite of the keeper’s incantation. A second and a
third time the prayer was repeated, but to no effect. Then the Hindu,
picking up the joint of a bamboo, murmured the prayer into it.
“Thou canst not hear the prayer of a poor man, O sacred one, through thy
ears,” wailed the merchant. “Listen then to this petition,” and, rising
in his place, he struck the animal sharply over the nose with the
bamboo. The bull turned a reproachful gaze on the violator of his
sanctity, looked sorrowfully at him for a moment through half-closed
eyelids, and strolled slowly away.
Conspicuous among the swarming thousands of Puri are the widows. With
the death of her husband the Hindu woman must shave her head and dress
in a snow-white sheet that clings closely about her as she walks. Under
no circumstances may she marry again nor lay aside the garb that
announces her bereavement. More often than not her departed spouse has
left her unprovided with this world’s goods, and in India the woman’s
means of earning a livelihood are—well, painfully limited. Under a
humane British rule the widow’s fate is less cruel than in the days when
she mounted the funeral pyre with her dead, perhaps; but it is certainly
no less humiliating. The uninformed sahib would seem justified in
supposing that the chief interest of the Indian wife is the preservation
of her husband’s health.
The Hindu woman of the masses enjoys an almost Occidental freedom from
seclusion. Compared with the coarse females of Mohammedan lands, she is
modest, almost dainty—pretty, too, in her younger days, for all her
color. But age comes early, and with the increase of wrinkles and
barbaric jewelry her charms fade. Her costume is more ample than that of
the Singhalese,—a single strip of cloth of ten or twelve yards wound
round her body from neck to ankles, leaving only arms and left shoulder
bare. Lithe and supple by nature, her every movement might be graceful
were it not the custom of her husband, dreading the tax collector, to
load her down with his surplus wealth. As a girl she is bedecked with
gaudy trinkets before her costume has advanced beyond the fig-leaf
stage; as a matron, her passing sounds like a junk-shop in the grasp of
a cyclone. It is no unusual experience to meet a female wearing rings on
every finger and toe; bracelets on both arms from wrists to elbows;
rings in the top, side, and lobe of each ear; and three nose-rings, one
of which, some two inches in diameter, pierces the left nostril and
swings back and forth against the cheek of the wearer. What a throb of
joy must come to the husband who presses so precious a wife to his
bosom! But on the other hand, as once I caught Marten musing to himself,
“Suppose she flew de coop?”
[Illustration: “Suttee” having been forbidden by their English rulers,
Hindu widows must now shave their heads, dress in white, and gain their
livelihood as best they can]
[Illustration: A seller of the wood with which the bodies of Hindus are
burned on the banks of the Ganges. Very despised caste.]
The term “old maid” has no synonym in Hindustanee, and needed none until
the first female missionary invaded the peninsula. Bachelors, too, are
rare. There chanced to fall into my hands an Anglo-Indian sheet wherein
was propounded this enigma over the signature of “a puzzled babu.”
“Why,” demanded the puzzled one, after the usual incomprehensible
introduction necessary to prove his knowledge of the sahib tongue, “is
the Englishman living many times without a wife? If the Hindu is more
than very young and has not yet married himself he is contemplated
wicked and unclean. I am reading that in all the white man countries
there live more women than the men are. Why has not every sahib taken
one for his wife?”
Why not, indeed?
Marten had begun to display an arrogant author’s pride in the tale that
had carried him so rapidly northward. Several times he had gone out of
his way in Puri to tell some Eurasian or babu the sad story of his
marooning, and, as afternoon crept on, he resolved to repeat it once
more for the entertainment of the commissioner of the district.
“But,” I protested, “you have a ticket to Calcutta. You can’t use two!”
“Right,” he answered, “but it’s about six cigarettes from the commish’s
bungalow to the station, and he may come up with the dibs without
sending a nigger so far to buy the pasteboard. If he don’t loosen we’ll
have to fix it up with the station master.”
The commissioner had fled to the hills and his deputy was a native; a
strange one, though, for he not only acceded to the request of the
stranded seaman for a through ticket, but actually and visibly hurried
to complete the necessary formalities before the departure of the daily
train. He did not “come up with the dibs,” however, nor would the
station master buy back the ticket which a government clerk purchased
for my companion. But there was some gain in the manœuvre; for upon his
arrival in Calcutta the railway officials very kindly refunded to Marten
some four rupees on the unused portion of the ticket from Berhampore.
An express similar to that from which we had alighted twenty-four hours
before rumbled into Khurda Road soon after we reached the main line. We
strolled along the platform and pulled open the door of the European
compartment—and fell back in astonishment. A familiar topee with bulging
hatband swung from a peg near the ceiling. On a bench beneath, reposed
the bundle which I had once lugged across the Maidan of Madras, and
beside it sat Haywood! For some cause unknown he had been released at
the end of six days’ imprisonment and had lost no time in taking the
north-bound express—without a ticket.
His joy at the reunion exceeded our own. Marten grumbled under his
breath at the fate that kept us in such baneful company, and, though he
did not hesitate to invent fanciful tales to explain to querulous
collectors the presence of three tropical helmets when only two
travelers were visible, he said nothing of the extra ticket in his
hatband. Several times during the night Haywood found it expedient to
drop out the further door for a stroll in the darkness, but he escaped
detection and, as the day dawned, alighted with us at the Howrah
terminal. He had “held down” the same train without paying an anna of
fare, for 1,032 miles!
The pontoon bridge connecting Howrah with Calcutta was alive with
coolies tramping from their wretched hovels on the western bank to a day
of toil in the city. A multitude of natives disported in the muddy
waters of the Hoogly before a sacred bathing ghat. Below the bridge
scores of ships lay at anchor, native sampans and barges inveigled their
way among them, from the docks came the rattle of steam cranes and the
shrill chatter of stevedores at their labor. Here, at last, was a real
city, with all its familiar roar and bustle. My companions departed to
visit a missionary notorious for his friendliness to beachcombers, and I
plunged at random into the stream of humanity that surged through the
dusty streets.