Driftwood Spars Part 26

Grossly-Grin----that is--er--Gosling-Green, I _should_ say."

Be sure your sins will find you out. Through wilful perversion of the pleasing name the Professor had rendered himself incapable of enunciating it.

"And what do _you_ do for India,--write, speak, organize, subscribe or what?" asked the lady with increasing severity.

"I work."

"In what capacity?"

"I am a professor at the Government Engineering College, here in Gungapur."

"O-h-h-h-h! You're one of the overpaid idlers who bolster up the Bureaucracy and batten on the....'"

"Allow me to a.s.sure you that I neither bolster, batten, nor bureau, Mrs.

Grizzling--I mean _Gosling_ Green. Nor do I talk through my hat. I----"

the Professor was beginning to get angry and to lose control.

"Perhaps you are one of us in disguise--a Pro-Native?"

"I am intensely Pro-Native."

The tall Pathan stared at the Professor.

"Oh, _good!_ I _beg_ your pardon! Cornelius, this gentleman is a Government professor and is _with us!_" said this female of the M.P.

species.

"That's right," gushed the Gosling. "We want a few in the enemy's camp both to spy out their weakness and to embarra.s.s them. Now about this University business. I am going to take it up. That history affair now!

_Scandalous!_ I _cannot_ tell you what a wave of indignation swept over England when that syllabus was drawn up. Nothing truly _Liberal_ about the whole course, much less Radical. I at once said: '_I_ will see this righted. _I_ will go to India, and _I_ will beard the....'"

"I think it was _I_ who said it, Cornelius," remarked his much better half, coldly.

"Yes, my dear Superiora, yes. Now with your help I think we can do something, Professor. Good. This _is_ providential. We shall be able to embarra.s.s them now! Will you write me----"

"You are going a little too fast, I think," said the Professor. "I am a 'Pro-Native' and a servant of the Pro-Native Government of India. As such, I don't think I can be of any service to twenty-one-day visitors who wish to 'embarra.s.s' the best friends of my friends the Natives, even supposing I were the sort of gentle Judas you compliment me by imagining me. I----"

"You distinctly say you are Pro-Native and then----"

"I repeat I am intensely Pro-Native, and so are the Viceroy, the Governors, the entire Civil Service, the Educational Service, the Forest Service, the P.W.D., the Medical Service, the Army, and every other Service and Department in India as well as every decent man in India. We are _all_ Pro-Native, and all doing our best in our respective spheres, in spite of a deal of ignorant and officious interference and attempted 'embarra.s.sment' at the hands of the self-seeking, the foolish, the busy-body, the idle--not to mention the vicious. What a _charming_ day it is. I have so enjoyed the honour of meeting you."

"Well, my Scroobious Bird! And have they this day roasted in India such a Gosling as shall never be put out?" inquired the non-moral and unphilosophic Professor of Moral Philosophy, a little later.

"No, my Augustus," was the reply. "It's a quacking little gosling, and won't lead to any great commotion m the farm-yard. Nasty little bird--like a _sat-bai_ or whatever they call those appalling things 'seven-sister' birds, aren't they, that chatter and squeak all day."

"Have a long drink and tell us all about it," replied Mr. Augustus Clarence Percy Marmaduke Grobble.

"Oh, same old game on the same old stage. Same old players. Leading lady and gent changed only. Huge great hideous bungalow, like a Goanese wedding-cake, in a vast garden of symmetrically arranged blue and red glazed 'art' flower-pots. Lofty room decorated with ancestral portraits done by Mr. Guzzlebhoy Fustomji Paintwallah; green gla.s.s chandeliers and big blue and white tin b.a.l.l.s; mauve carpet with purple azure roses; wall-paper, bright pink with red lilies and yellow cabbages; immense mouldy mirrors, and a tin alarm clock. Big crowd of all the fly-blown rich knaves of the place who have got more than they want out of Government or else haven't got enough. Only novelty was a splendid Pathan chap, got-up in English except for the conical cap and puggri.

Extraordinarily like Ross-Ellison, except that he had long black Pathan hair on his shoulders. Been to England; barrister probably, and seemed the most viciously seditious of the lot. Silly ignorant Goslings in the middle saying to Brahmins, 'And you are Muscleman, aren't you, or are you a Dhobi?' and to Parsis, 'I suppose you High Caste gentlemen have to bathe _every_ day?' shoving their awful ignorance under the noses of everybody, and inquiring after the healths of the 'chief wives'. Silly fatuous geese!--and then talking the wildest piffle about the 'burning question of the hour' and making the seditious rotters groan at their inept.i.tude and folly, until they cheer them up sudden-like with a bit of dam' treason and sedition they ought to be jailed for. _Jailed_. I nearly threw a fit when the old geezer, in a blaze of diamonds and glory, brought up old Phossy and presented him to the Gander, and he murmured:--

"'My _deah_ friend,' as Phossy held on to his paw in transports, 'to think of their casting _you_ into jail,' and old Mother Potiphar squeaked: _'Oh, this is not the forger of that name--but the eminent politeecian'_. But poor Gosly had thought he had been a political prisoner! Meant no offence. And then some little squirt of an editor primed him with lies about the University and the new syllabus, and straightway the Gander tried to get me on the 'embarra.s.s the Government'

lay, and talked as though he knew all about it. 'I'll get some of the ladies of my committee sent out here as History-lecturers at your University,' says he. 'They'll teach pure Liberal History and inculcate true ideas of liberty and self-government.' I wanted to go outside and be ill. Good old 'Paget M.P.'--takes up a 'Question' and writes a silly pamphlet on it and thinks he's said the last word.--Written thousands.--Don't matter so long as he does it in England.--Just the place for him nowadays.--But when he feels he's shoved out of the lime-light by a longer-haired Johnny, it's rough luck that he should try and get back by spending his blooming committee's money coming here and deludin' the poor seditionist and seducin' your Hatter from his allegiance to his salt.... Awful old fraud really--no ability whatever.

Came to my college to spout once, in my time. Lord! Still he was a guest, and we let him go. Run by his missus really, I think. Why can't she stop at home and hammer windows? They say she went and asked the Begum of Bhopal to join her in a 'mission and crusade'. Teach the Zenana Woman and Purdah Lady to Come Forth instead of Bring Forth. Come Forth and smash windows. Probably true. Silly Goslings. Drop 'em.... What did you think of our bowling yesterday? With anything like a wicket your College should be...."

Entering his lonely and sequestered bungalow that evening Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed changed his Pathan dress for European dining-kit, removed his beard and wig, and became Mr. Robin Ross-Ellison. After dinner he wrote to the eminent Cold weather Visitor to India, Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, as follows--

"DEAR SIR,

"As I promised this afternoon, when you graciously condescended to honour me with your illuminating conversation, I enclose the papers which I guaranteed would shed some light on certain aspects of Indian conditions, and which I consider likely to give you food for thought.

"As I was myself educated in India, was brought up to maturity with Indian students, and have lived among them in many different places, I may claim to know something about them. As a cla.s.s they are gentle, affectionate, industrious, well-meaning and highly intelligent. They are the most malleable of human metal, the finest material for the sculptor of humanity, the most impressionable of wax. In the right hands they can be moulded to anything, by the right leader led to any height. And conversely, of them a devil can make fiends. By the wrong leader they can be led down to any depth.

"The crying need of India is n.o.ble men to make n.o.ble men of these fine impressionable youths. Read the enclosed and take it that the writer (who wrote this recently in Gungapur Jail) is typical of a large cla.s.s of misled, much-to-be-pitied youths, wrecked and ruined and destroyed--their undoing begun by an unspeakably false and spurious educational ideal, and completed by the writings, and the spoken words of heartless unscrupulous scoundrels who use them to their own vile ends.

"Read, Sir, and realize how truly n.o.ble, useful and beautiful is your great work of endeavouring to embarra.s.s our wicked Government, to weaken its prestige here and in England, to encourage its enemies, to increase discontent and unrest, to turn the thoughts of students to matters political, and, in short, to carry on the good work of the usual Self-advertising Visitation M.P.

"Humbly thanking your Honour, and wishing your Honour precisely the successes and rewards that your Honour deserves,

"I remain,

"The dust of your Honour's feet,

"ILDERIM DOST MAHOMMED."

And Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, M.P., read as follows:--

... And so I am to be hanged by the neck till I am dead, am I? And for a murder which I never committed, and in the perpetration of which I had no hands? Is it, my masters? I trow so. But I can afford to spit--for I did commit a murder, nevertheless, a beautiful secret murder that no one could possibly ever bring to my home or cast in my tooth.

"Well, well! Hang me and grin in sleeve--and I will laugh on other side of face while dancing on nothing--for if you think you are doing me in eye, I know I have done you in eye!

"Yes. _I_ murdered Mr. Spensonly, the Chief Secretary of the Nuddee River Commission.

"As the Latin-and-Greeks used to say, '_Solo fesit_'!

"You think Mr. Spensonly died of plague? So he did. And who caused him to have plague? In short, who _plagued_ him? (Ha! Ha! An infinite jest!) You shall know all about it and about, as Omar says, for I am going now to write my autobiography of myself, as all great so-called Criminals have done, for the admiration of mankind and the benefit of posterity.

And my fellow-brothers and family-members shall proudly publish it with my photo--that of a great Patriot Hero and second Mazzini, Robespierre, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Wallace, Charlotte Corday, Kosciusko, and Mr. Robert Bruce (of spider fame).

"And I shall welcome death and embrace the headsman ere making last speech and dying confession. Having long desired to know what lies Beyond, I shall make virtue of necessity and seize opportunity (of getting to know) to play hero and die gamish.

"Not like the Pathan murderer who walked about in front of condemned cell with Koran balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He!

He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! Pooh! and Bah! for all holy men. I give spurnings to them all for fools, knaves, or hypocrites. There are no G.o.ds any more for educated gentleman, except himself, and that's very good G.o.d to worship and make offering to (Ha! Ha! What a wit will be lost to the silly world when it permits itself to lose me.)

"Well, to return to the sheep, as the European proverb has it. I was born here in Gungapur, which will also have honour of being my death-and-cremation place, of poor but honest parent on thirty rupees a mensem. He was very clever fellow and sent five sons to Primary School, Middle School, High School and Gungapur Government College at cost of over hundred rupees a month, all out of his thirty rupees a mensem. He always used proverb 'Politeness lubricates wheels of life and palm also,' and he obliged any man who made it worth his while. But he fell into bad odours at hands of Mr. Spensonly owing to folly of bribing-fellow sending cash to office and the letter getting into Mr.

Spensonly's post-bag and opening by mistake.

"But the Sahib took me up into his office to soften blow to progenitor and that shows he was a bad man or his luck would not have been to take me in and give chance to murder him.