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The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth.
Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!"
It didn't last long, however, for an important fat khansamah hurried in, shocked at our plight, and, explaining that his sahib, Mr. Lister, was away for a few days, brought us a lamp and other necessaries. Dinner was not possible under the circumstances the box with our forks and knives had not arrived so the remains of Mrs.
This we do faithfully, and the Chupprassee always reminds me of those tools we see advertised, which combine hammer, pincers, turnscrew, chisel, foot-rule, hatchet, file, toothpick, and life preserver. Mrs. Smart bewailed the bygone day when every servant in her house was a Government Chupprassee except the khansamah and a Portuguese ayah.
There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib's tragic death in three separate stations two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dogcart.
She had the reputation of being very wealthy, and her old khansamah I know had also done himself very well, as when he retired he set up as a ticca gharri proprietor just at the junction of Camac Street and Theatre Road, and was one of the first to introduce into Calcutta the "Fitton" gharri.
Amber, overwhelmed by the discovery of this abundance, promptly went to the extreme of calling in the khansamah to sluice him down with jar after jar, and felt like himself for the first time in five days when, shaved and dressed, he returned to the common living-room of the resthouse. The girl kept him waiting but a little while.
Then came the ratub a curious meal, half native and half English in composition with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below. "Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?" I asked. "No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard-room." "A how much?"
But instead of going to the store cupboard, where the old Khansamah awaited her, armed with his daily hissab, she slipped into the drawing-room, sat down at her bureau, and leaned her head on her hand; honestly hoping that Theo might leave the house without coming to her. For all that, the sound of his elastic step brought a light into her eyes.
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