“What are you looking at him all the time for? I am here too, I
suppose?”
“Yes,” she said. “And listen: I am coming this evening.”
It was the day after this that Glahn got the letter. There came a letter
for him, sent up by express messenger from the river station, and it had
made a detour of a hundred and eighty miles. The letter was in a
woman's hand, and I thought to my self that perhaps it was from that
former friend of his, the noble lady. Glahn laughed nervously when he
had read it, and gave the messenger extra money for bringing it. But it
was not long before he turned silent and gloomy, and did nothing but sit
staring straight before him. That evening he got drunk--sat drinking
with an old dwarf of a native and his son, and clung hold of me too, and
did all he could to make me drink as well.
Then he laughed out loud and said:
“Here we are, the two of us, miles away in the middle of all India
shooting game--what? Desperately funny, isn't it? And hurrah for all the
lands and kingdoms of the earth, and hurrah for all the pretty women,
married or unmarried, far and near. Hoho! Nice thing for a man when a
married woman proposes to him, isn't it--a married woman?”
“A countess,” I said ironically. I said it very scornfully, and that cut
him. He grinned like a dog because it hurt him. Then suddenly he
wrinkled his forehead and began blinking his eyes, and thinking hard if
he hadn't said too much--so mighty serious was he about his bit of a
secret. But just then a lot of children came running over to our hut and
crying out: “Tigers, ohoi, the tigers!” A child had been snapped up by a
tiger quite close to the village, in a thicket between it and the river.
That was enough for Glahn, drunk as he was, and cut up about something
into the bargain. He picked up his rifle and raced off at once to the
thicket--didn't even put on his hat. But why did he take his rifle
instead of a shot-gun, if he was really as plucky as all that? He had to
wade across the river, and that was rather a risky thing in itself--but
then, the river was nearly dry now, till the rains. A little later I
heard two shots, and then, close on them, a third. Three shots at a
single beast, I thought; why, a lion would have fallen for two, and this
was only a tiger! But even those three shots were no use: the child was
torn to bits and half eaten by the time Glahn come up. If he hadn't been
drunk he wouldn't have made the attempt to save it.
He spent the night drinking and rioting in the hut next door. For two
days he was never sober for a minute, and he had found a lot of
companions, too, to drink with him. He begged me in vain to take part in
the orgy. He was no longer careful of what he said, and taunted me with
being jealous of him.
“Your jealousy makes you blind,” he said.
My jealousy? I, jealous of him?
“Good Lord!” I said, “I jealous of you? What's there for me to be
jealous about?”
“No, no, of course you're not jealous of me,” he answered. “I saw Maggie
this evening, by the way. She was chewing something, as usual.”