# A Drop or Two of White

Extracted from The Golden Book Magazine, Sept 1925, pp. 330–338. [Copyright, 1916, by The Ridgway Company; permission of The Bobbs-Merrill Company.]
A Drop or Two of White
By TALBOT MUNDY
Dum-dum Tomkinson began the feud. He owned it, so to speak. Or, if you dig down deep enough to the prime cause of things, Pontius Pilate started it. But then Dum-dum owned Pontius Pilate, so it amounts to the same thing.
At the other end was Antonio Fernandez de Braganza, and what introduced him originally was fifteen rupees that were left to him after he had paid his railway fare from Goa. He was rich enough to buy a decent suit of clothes; and though he could not run to shoes, he looked clean and smiled ingratiatingly. Also, he let himself be kicked without remonstrance.
So a mess sergeant recommended him, and he was hired as extra supernumerary, sub-assistant mess attendant, on half pay. It followed that he made his fortune (there are wheels within wheels in India) and, like all his breed, he did not return to Goa.
But Dum-dum needs introduction first—Dum-dum of the R. & R. Romney and Rotherhithe is the full of it, but they are a great deal better known as the Royal and Reprehensible; and for all their South of England name, they are recruited mainly from the Tower Hamlets, and the purlieus of Wapping High Street, and High Holborn, and the Old Kent Road.
There was scarcely a man in the regiment who had not at some stage in his career sold papers in the streets, or who had not learned at about the time he cut his teeth what was wicked and what wasn't, and which was more amusing.
Dum-dum Tomkinson was the private who enjoyed—to the limit—the worst reputation in the regiment. It was he who always egged the others on to mischief, and acted more outrageously than any; but when the time came for discovery and Nemesis he had either a wonderfully worked-out alibi, or else an argument without a flaw.
It was he, for instance, who suggested and led the tying of the British Captain of a Goorkha company one night, and spanked him with his own scabbard; but Privates Giles and Harrison went to jail for it. Dum-dum put pork-fat in the corn-meal meant for a Pathan regiment, and all but precipitated a holy war; but a commissariat sergeant got the blame. And Dum-dum cut the drain, and washed the Connaught Rangers out of house and home the first night of the monsoon. The Connaughts blamed the Black Watch and emphasized it with their fists; a half-breed sanitation clerk got reduced and fined, and twenty of the Connaughts and Black Watch got twenty days apiece C. B. Dum-dum got nothing out of it except amusement.
He had a close-cut bullet head, an impudent mustache, and a grin that could rile the very marrow of a provost sergeant. He knew when to grin, and just when not to; and he knew the intricacies of the Queen's Regulations better than a cat knows the way home along the house tops. And—with an utterness unspeakable—he did not love Antonio Fernandez de Braganza.
At the bottom of the hill, facing the long barrack lines of British infantry, there nestled, hot and horrible, the city of Deesiribad. It had a tower or two, whence muezzins called the faithful to bellowing prayer, some minarets, and half a dozen Hindu temples. From a distance, unless the wind bore the smell in that direction, it looked sweet and almost biblical, belying its true character. There, in a shack of sorts, that had a row of trees growing in the space in front of it, Antonio Braganza—barefooted still, but owner now of a thousand-rupee bank account—established his “HOTEL FOR EUROPEANS ONLY.”
All that had nothing in the world to do with Jock. He was a dog that the Black Watch owned, and they swore he was a champion in every way there is. He was big and bony and bad-tempered, and they were quite prepared to bet on him.
But Dum-dum owned Pontius Pilate and a very tricky brain; so the Scotsmen had to lay the odds—as much as nine to five in cases. The fight took place on the parade-ground, and Pontius Pilate won. The Watch, being sportsmen and consequently men of honor, paid; the seed of happenings was sown; and Dum-dum and a dozen friends went down-hill to Braganza's to blow the money in.
When the money was all spent the provost sergeant and a patrol looked in on the scene, and picked Dum-dum and his friends from under tables and out of corners, and frog-marched them up-hill back to barracks. There was nothing unusual in that, nor anything unmerciful in fourteen days' cells apiece and twenty-one days' C. B. that followed as a natural corollary. So far nobody bore any grudge.
But Antonio Fernandez de Braganza was a man of business acumen and foresight. He came to the orderly room next morning and showed the commanding officer a dirty scrap of paper bearing the signature of P. H. Tomkinson, private, R. & R., with a scrawl above it admitting full responsibility for damage done. Pinned to it was Antonio's private estimate amounting to a total of two hundred rupees.
Dum-dum denied the signature, but the Colonel made him write his name twelve times quickly in his presence, and the handwriting was found to correspond. Then Dum-dum denied indignantly that he had written anything above the signature; but the provost sergeant swore, the guard deposed, and Dum-dum himself admitted that he had been far too drunk that night to remember anything. So all that remained to be done was to audit the amount of damages.
After considerable heated argument, the Colonel reduced the total down to seventy rupees, and ordered Dum-dum's pay assessed accordingly. Antonio departed smiling, and Dum-dum went swearing back to cells, feeling for the first time since he passed through his recruit course that he had got “the dog's end of a deal.”
Even yet, though the matter was not serious, the memory of it rankled in Dum-dum's mind, but his thirst grew, too, as he worked at the fatigues an ingenious sergeant-major devised for him. And, with the thirst, there came a plan into his head.
So he reported eventually off the C. B. list, and cleaned himself, and shook the dust of barracks off his feet, and marched off down the hill to execute the plan.
“Four fingers o' them idol's tears o' yours!” he demanded. “Quick!”
“Four annas!” smiled Antonio, showing his amazing teeth and mopping at the bar.
“Quick, I said, you Christy minstrel! Throw your weight about!”
“No money, no brandy!” smiled Antonio.
“See 'ere!” said Dum-dum, leaning one elbow on the bar, and holding his other hand suspiciously behind him. “You've 'ad the best o' me—so far. Not countin' what I spent in 'ere that night o' the dawg fight, you've 'ad thirty-five rupees o' my pay, and there's another thirty-five a-comin'. Well an' good. You 'and across that bottle like a man, or I'll show you 'ow a man be'aves!”
Braganza grinned and showed the whites of his eyes as he glanced sidewise. In the mirror he could see that Dum-dum's other hand was empty after all.
“I—ah—do not geeve credit.”
“You'll credit me with seventy dibs' worth, you black heathen, against that pay o' mine you're drawin', or I'll fix you so's you won't never sell 'no more booze to nobody—see?”
Braganza knew from grim experience the consequence of arguing with soldiers, so he finished wiping off the bar and stepped behind a glass door to the rear; thence he could watch the bottles on the shelves without obtruding his provocative personality.
“Come out o' that!”
There was no answer.
“You ten parts nigger, one part dago thief, come out o' that, d'ye hear?”
But still there was no answer.
So, as any righteous-minded gentleman belonging to a race of conquerors would do under similar conditions, Dum-dum picked up the brass spittoon with the portrait of the King of Portugal on it, and pitched it through the glass panel as a hint.
Five minions of Braganza's—all his countrymen, and all barefooted—answered his raucous summons, and bravely essayed to throw Dum-dum out into the street. He had on ammunition boots, of course, and his temper had not been sweetened by his thirst.
So his five antagonists sat down in acrobatic attitudes in different spots and nursed their injured feet, while Dum-dum with a bottle in each hand rushed around and did his best to brain the terrified Braganza. He had hit him twice, and had smashed one bottle—the provost sergeant happened in again.
“And I didn't get one drink—not one!” mourned Dum-dum afterward.
He was frog-marched up the hill again, still fighting, with a fragment of the patrol's trousers in each hand; and they had to put a strait-jacket on him in the guard-room, he was so indignant. But by next morning he put up a wonderful defense.
He swore that he had been suddenly attacked by overwhelming numbers without the slightest provocation, and that his righteous indignation had been roused almost to mania by Antonio Braganza's uninvited strictures on the character and habits of the Colonel of the R. & R.
“Called you a drunkard, sir, 'e did!”
So he only got fourteen days again in cells, and twenty-one C. B.
But there—all red and ready—was a blood feud of the type that keeps the East and West apart more thoroughly than sea or mountain range. A white man had been bested by a very black man, and the black man would not surrender even part of what was his.
It was a cloud like a man's hand rising on the five-weeks-off horizon, and all Deesiribad proceeded to await the outcome with feelings not unmixed. Some laughed, and some were frightened; some counseled friend Antonio to pull up stakes and quit. But Antonio, for reasons of his own, stayed on, and hoped and prayed that luck might avert the breaking of the storm.
II
The native of the East who has a little, little drop of white or near-white blood in him is sometimes blacker than the purest aborigine. But just as the East can hear halftones of music undetectable by Western ears, so Goanese for instance, can see grades of color where their scornful white detractors notice nothing but ungraded ebony.
Antonio Fernandez de Braganza boasted—when nobody with boots on was about—of a great-great-grandfather who had been a Portuguese post-office clerk, full-blooded. He would not mix with people whose great-great-grandfathers had been half-breeds, unless from dire necessity. He looked blacker than the ace of spades to Western eyes, but he would speak of any one he thought his equal as “almost as light-colored as myself.” And not a man in all his dusky brotherhood would smile.
That, naturally, was a point of view that bred ambition far more burning than the money-making kind.
Antonio knew soldiers. Ever since his star had begun to rise in India's firmament he had been associated with them; and he had been kicked by them until his sense of their superiority was fixed, like well dried-out cement. It would have taken dynamite to shift it.
Once, after a dinner that made history in western India, he had been kicked by a full-blown major-general, and there are astonishingly few mortal men so favored. Antonio was proud of it. He wore the memory of that kick as other men would wear a medal, only more so.
Soldiers were his living, his horizon. They had always made the difference to him between abject poverty and wonderful prosperity. So it was not more than natural that what at best annoyed most Europeans should seem to him like brilliant spots upon the darkened page of history. When Thomas Atkins so far forgot his pride of race, and his prospects, as to marry a half-caste woman, there would be swearing in the clubs and messes and canteens; but Antonio Fernandez de Braganza would buy himself a new pair of colored cotton trousers, and take his boots out of the locker, and attend the wedding.
Then for a week he would talk in strangely sounding English, meant to show class-exclusiveness, and he would call his cronies “dear old chappie, don'tcherknow.”
As year succeeded year and the original thousand-rupee bank account swelled gradually up into the tens of thousands, there crept into the bosom of Antonio a secret thought that grew, from cherishing, into a wish—that waxed, and dared, and mounted to a hope—and finally became ambition. It was nothing yet to boast about, or whisper; but if ever great poetic soul nursed fevered longings underneath a dusky skin; if ever brown eyes blazed with checked emotion; if ever voice betrayed by altered tones its owner's awakening to a sense of greater things—that voice, those eyes, that spirit were Antonio's.
He began to clip and carve his straggling black beard into a neat torpedo shape, and keep it so. He took to wearing boots every evening, and a clean shirt once a week.
In fact, he did all the things, and did them thoroughly, that betray the insidious encroachments of the little love god.
And she—who shall describe her? Certainly Antonio could not. She counted for nothing to the privileged white-skinned race, and for less than nothing to the altogether dark; but among the snuff-and-butter-colored bloods she ranked as more than queen.
Snuff and butter in the right proportions blend into a glowing gold that sets off raven hair and dark-brown eyes to absolute perfection. Her beauty alone would have brought her social distinction in the half-caste world, but the fact that her father had been a quartermaster-sergeant, British born, placed her so far above the rest as to make Antonio's ambition like that of an earthworm aspiring to the air.
The father had died, and had been relegated gladly to oblivion by his own race. Her mother drew a tiny pension, ran a boarding-house, and died too, leaving Alexandra Eulalia Sophia Hendon a modest competence; and an aunt—on the mother's side, and dark—looked after her as if she were a princess of the blood royal.
Antonio's chances, then, were slim. Money counts for something in all layers of society, but such gulfs as lie between a quartermaster-sergeant's daughter who is quite half white and beautiful as well, and a Goanese innkeeper boasting of nothing better than a drop or two of Portuguese, are unbridgeable by anything except the super-human.
Love, though, is superhuman. Antonio knew as much from studying his own sensations. So he started, with all the poetry and fervor of the East and West combined, to wage strategic warfare against convention. And any woman, tackled that way, will be flattered, no matter who the besieger is. Besides, there was Pontius Pilate.
While Dum-dum Tomkinson toiled at barrack-yard fatigues, the ill-conditioned mongrel wandered as he chose, and picked up a living mostly on the back verandas of dark-skinned hosts who were afraid of him. In fact, he levied blackmail, for everybody knew to whom he belonged and what dire consequences might result from using sticks and stones to drive the brute away. So he waxed fat and prospered.
The houses where he found the blackmail easiest were those where only women lived, and of them the easiest of all was that occupied by Alexandra Eulalia Sophia Hendon and her aunt. There he would choose to lie, then, through the long hot afternoons, and suffer scraps to be tossed to him whenever a mere woman wished to venture out of doors.
Thither, too, came Antonio, booted and flossed up in his best, to make excuses for an interview.
If Alexandra Eulalia Sophia, with pale blue ribbon in her hair, should choose the moment of his coming to seek coolness on the veranda, that was nobody's affair but hers. But the mongrel lying in the shade snarled none the less, and Alexandra screamed. She naturally had no scraps of meat with her; and the swinging chair that showed her figure off so well was at the far end of the veranda. Besides, she had a very pretty ankle. She did not want to encourage Antonio's attentions openly, but she did want to be admired; so she drew her dress back, and essayed to pass the growling brute without touching him.
The dog flew at her, seized her dress, ripped off a yard of it, and flew at her again.
What long-forgotten Vasco da Gama blood rose then in Antonio's veins, or how he overcame the cowardice inbred by centuries of scorn and terrorism, are matters Dan Cupid must decide; but he acted on the instant. He vaulted the veranda rail, and landed boots and all on the back of the worst-tempered parasite of the British Army.
In a second, before he realized what he had done, he was fighting for dear life with a brute whose only leave to live was granted him because he could outfight anything. The dog had him by the throat—he was in his best clothes, and had donned a collar fortunately—and_the end seemed a question only of how long Antonio could cling to life without drawing any breath.
The aunt rushed out and screamed. Alexandra screamed. Several neighbors came and screamed. There was plenty of advice, but nobody did anything—except Antonio. He worked his toil-strengthened fingers in between the brute's jaws, and began to break the teeth one by one. In a minute, he could force two fingers in; a second later, he could force in three; and then he reached for, grabbed, and held the tongue, driving his nails in to overcome the slipperiness.
The dog, for one foolish, ill-considered fraction of a second, loosed his hold to get a better grip and end things; and in that instant his tongue came out by the roots. The rest was easy. In another minute Antonio had him by the hind legs and was dashing out his brains against the veranda woodwork.
It was Alexandra Eulalia Sophia's fingers that bathed and bandaged poor Antonio's wounds, her fan that cooled him, her lips that praised him until Heaven knew what sensations coursed up and down his spine. It was her aunt who asked him in, and brought up the wicker chair for him, and told him he might call again as often as he chose; and it was Alexandra Eulalia Sophia who sat beside him in the tikka-gharri that was sent for to take the hero home.
But deep, deep down in Antonio's happy, hopeful heart, there lay a feeling of impending trouble. It would not die away. It grew. It took away more than nine-tenths of his happiness, and sometimes even sickened him with fright.
Up in the barrack yard, doing endless, aggravating, hard-labor fatigues in the hot sun, Dum-dum Tomkinson had heard about the death of Pontius Pilate, and the circumstances that attended it.
He had not vowed vengeance. He had grinned, and a full description of the grin had been carried to Antonio within eight hours by a dozen different people.
Had Dum-dum uttered threats, Antonio could have asked for and received protection. But Dum-dum did not threaten. If Dum-dum had broken bounds, and had come down in the night to break Antonio's head, spies would have brought the news, and an arrest would have been made in time.
But Dum-dum only toiled on in the barrack square, and grinned, and Antonio—making amazing progress with his love affair—felt, with each new step won, more like a murderer under sentence.
III
Other Eurasians still scoffed at the idea of Antonio's love-suit. To slaves of the iron-bound middle sphere, that is neither black nor white, his marriage to Alexandra Eulalia Sophia was unthinkable.
But to Dum-dum Tomkinson the whole thing was instantly an open book. That is the way of Thomas Atkins, who thinks himself an Orientalist, and really is nothing of the kind. He ignores the standards and devious arguments and byways of the East, and sometimes arrives—by a jump—at perfectly correct conclusions.
The orderly-room clerk was a friend of his, and as it happened passed him in the barrack square within a quarter of an hour of the breaking of the news about his dog. All the regimental, and many other records were available to the clerk at practically any time.
“Who's this 'ere Mrs. Wade?” asked Dum-dum. “'Er what 'as the 'ouse where Pontius Pilot lost 'is number?”
“Widow of a railway man. Guardian, or what you care to call it, to Miss Hendon.”
“She the gal what Ponpi tried to worry? Know anything about 'er?”
“I can find out.”
Within an hour Dum-dum knew that Alexandra Eulalia Sophia was the daughter of Quartermaster-sergeant Hendon, of the R. & R., deceased; and the grin that he had worn since they had told him of the dog's death grew wider.
““Didn't know as 'ow we was ever quartered 'ere afore,” he volunteered for the sake of further information.
“We weren't. The other battalion was at Ahmedabad. Hendon took his discharge there, and came up here to live.”
“Gawd pity 'im!”
“His daughter's a piece of all-right! Yum-yum!”
“So?” Dum-dum seemed relieved to hear it. “'Ow is it none of us never sees 'er, then?”
“Keeps 'erself to 'erself—respectable gal—brought up proper. That's why.”
Dum-dum seemed extremely edified to hear it. His face beamed pleasure.
“I 'opes as 'ow she's all she ought to be!” he muttered piously, slapping on the whitewash. “I 'opes as 'ow 'e loves 'er. I 'opes as 'ow she means the 'ole bloomin' world to 'im, an' more. I does—I do—I does. So 'elp me two privates an' a provost sergeant, I surely does!”
For the rest of that afternoon, and all that evening, although the sergeant-major found a dozen extra tasks for him and nagged him pitilessly, Private Dum-dum Tomkinson grinned happily.
He grinned day after day, and was grinning still when he reported off the C. B. list.
During the three or four hot months that followed, Dum-dum behaved himself in such an exemplary manner that his intimates chaffed him about playing for promotion. He repudiated that with all the scorn it merited, but he steadfastly refused to get drunk in canteen or elsewhere, and he avoided Braganza's as though it were a plague spot.
But he kept himself very well informed on the progress of the love affair, and when the engagement was at last announced he was among the first to hear of it. He was one of the first, too, to call on Antonio and congratulate him when the date for the wedding had been fixed.
“I wishes yer luck, Antonio, my son! I wishes yer Gawd's own luck! I 'opes as 'ow yer comes by yer deserts! Shake 'ands on that!”
So Antonio shook hands, and Dum-dum swaggered out again, leaving the unhappy Goanese quaking and suffering beneath a sickening load of fear.
It was noticeable after that that Dumdum spent a lot of spare time talking to his cronies, and even with men who were not at all his cronies. He walked down to the Black Watch lines, and argued there for an hour or two, but did not seem to have much luck.
He got one or two men interested, but that was all. Thence, though, he went to the Connaught Rangers, and found the Irishmen like tinder waiting for a match; soon he had half the regiment arguing with the other half in odd corners.
“And remember this,” he kept on telling them. “That day's the very day when the polo championship comes off at Abu. There'll be just enough officers left 'ere to do the rounds, and not a perishing extry one! We'll 'ave it all our own way—an' they can't 'ang, nor yet C. B. three 'ole reg'ments!”
IV
The City Magistrate was taking chota hazri on his cool veranda in pajamas when an abject individual—barefooted, but arrayed in wondrous cotton trousers—approached him diffidently through the compound. He salaamed profoundly, then recalled his modicum of white blood and stood upright, hands beside him, hat in hand. The hat was a marvel—panama type, two feet wide from brim to brim.
“What d'you want?” The magistrate was none too pleased to hear petitions at that hour of the day.
“Ver-ee sor-ee, sir, to trouble you, but——”
He shifted from one foot to the other, looking sheepish, foolish, helpless—anything but like a bridegroom; head a little to one side, and his hat moving restlessly from hand to hand. His toes, too, twiddled as though he were in torture.
“Well, what?”
“I will be getting married this morning, sir.”
“—— you, Braganza! Didn't I sign the license? Don't I know it? Go and get married, and confound you!”
“But, sir——”
He was more than ever abject. His teeth were a splash of purest white on a sea of black, and his eyes two alternating spheres of white and brown.
“But what?”
“I am ver-ee much af-raid, sir.”
“Of what?”
“Sir, of the militar-ee.”
“Of the soldiers? Why?”
“They are likel-ee to make trouble, sir.”
“Indeed? What makes you suppose that?”
“There is one certain Private Tomkinson, sir, who is my enemy.”
“Now we're getting nearer!, That cuts it down to one man. Has he been making threats?”
“Five months ago, sir, he—”
“And you have the impudence to come here at this hour and bother me, because a drunken private chose to threaten you five months ago? Has he threatened you since?”
“Not openl-ee, sir.”
“How d'you mean—not openly?”
“He has smiled, sir, ver-ee meaningl-ee.”
“Oh, he has, has he? And because this private grinned at you, I'm to be disturbed at breakfast, eh? I'll give you just one minute to get out of the compound! Boy! Bring me my watch and dog whip, quickly!”
So Antonio took his leave in something less than half the time allotted to him, and, trembling at the knees and sick at heart, set himself to watching from his roof for signs of catastrophe descending from the hill. He knew—and his heart turned to water within him at the thought—that on a Thursday, with many more than half the officers away, there would be nothing much to keep the soldiers in barracks.
And he labored under no delusions about Tomkinson. There was too much Eastern subtlety and atmosphere about Dum-dum's smiling silence for Braganza not to understand the meaning of it. The wedding was no secret; on the contrary, it was to be a Goanesely brilliant affair. Dum-dum had congratulated him, so Dum-dum knew about it. But Dum-dum had said nothing! The suspense of wondering what was going to happen was worse than the torturing wait had been for Alexandra Eulalia Sophia's answer!
He was all but sweating blood when the time came to draw his boots on, and make a brave show before his friends, and drive to the little Catholic chapel on the outskirts of the city. He did try to smile, but the result was sickly; it only accentuated the green tint underneath his dusky skin.
“Oh, how he is in love!” sighed Cortez, his best man.
“Ah, what a passion holds him!” nodded de Catania, climbing in and sitting with his back to the horses (they had two!)
“Love! Love is like the sun; it wilts the flower it shines on!” quoted Mendez, buttoning a white glove, and getting in beside de Catania. “Antonio is the flower of chivalry! Behold—he wilts!”
It was all in English—all meant seriously—all designed to leave in friend Antonio's mind pleasant memories of a day of days, civilized to the last notch, and brimming over with refinement. They only wished they were as pale as he, that they might do more honor to him.
The carriage started; the white-beribboned driver beat the pair of crocks to make them prance, and the three friends attended to their smiles and the set of their salmon-pink cravats. But Antonio groaned aloud.
“Ah, love is a ver-ee seerious malad-ee,” approved Cortez. “Ha-ha! A fortunate affliction! One we are praying is contag-i-ous! Ha-ha-ha!”
“Look!” groaned Antonio, and they all three stared. All three turned gray as friend Antonio beneath the black.
There was a dust-cloud on the hillside—a cloud kicked up by men who marched, and by far more than a dozen men. There were many hundred coming down the hill, not in formation, but in little groups of three and four who marched as they chose, those all in one direction.
“Mother of God!” groaned Antonio, leaning back against the horse-hair cushions in a state of near-collapse. “They will get there first—they will reach the chapel first—they will——”
Even in that awful moment he spoke English, and set a good example to the rest; but there his ability to be a man left off. He was only Portuguese and water, and he knew it—nine parts water, black.
“Possibl-ee they go to play a football match,” suggested he of the purple pants, de Catania, the optimist.
“Or a battle bee-tween dogs,” hazarded Mendez; and at the mere suggestion of a dog-fight poor Antonio groaned from bitterness of recollection.
“Let us drive another way,” advised Cortez. “Let us ap-proach thee chapel from thee far side (his teeth were chattering) and notice casual-ee what they do, beefore taking the matter underneath advisement—that ees my idee-a. Ho—gharri-wallah—sita haht!”
The driver pulled out to the right, but Antonio recovered some of his self-possession all at once; he sat up suddenly, and struck at the driver with a silver-mounted cane.
“No-no-no! Drive on, driver! Drive ahead! No turning a-side! Straight! (every word of it in English, still!). She will bee waiting there for me—there will bee onlee women with her,” he said in explanation. The little drop of white was coming uppermost.
“Trul-ee—she might conceivabl-ee suppose we are afraid,” assented Mendez, feeling at his collar, that bordered on collapse.
“She will know better!” snapped Antonio. “She will be waiting there. That iss thee reason!”
His three friends sat and stared at him. Was this Antonio? They had thought him more afraid than they!
All four of them nearly fell out of the carriage as they rounded the last corner but one before the chapel. There was a little public square in front of them, and it was crammed, jammed full with soldiers. There were Connaughts there, and R. & R.'s, and Highlanders, though not so many Highlanders. And there was Dum-dum, grinning; he stood out in front.
“They appear exceedingl-ee susceptible to provocation!” diagnosed Cortez timidly.
“Possibl-ee they come to celebrate the wedding of a former mess-attendant,” hoped Mendez out aloud. “That would indeed be most praiseworth-ee.”
Dum-dum cut the speculation short. “Halt!” he roared; and like a flash—as if a shell had fallen in their midst—the three friends vanished. They streaked over the high back of the carriage, and vamoosed. The watching soldiers roared.
“Give an account o' yourself!” demanded Dum-dum. “Where are you goin'?”
“You know me, and you know where I am going,” said Antonio. “Allow me to drive on. I go to marry Miss Hendon.”
He felt very lonely in the carriage by himself, but he was too busy scanning faces for a possible sympathizer to find time to think about the friends who had deserted him.
“'Ear that, mates? This 'ere black Goanese swine says as 'ow 'e's a-goin' to marry the daughter of a bloomin' British sergeant!”
The announcement was greeted with another roar of laughter. There were no sympathizers there. The men were evidently bent on mischief. Saving just here and there, the laughter had almost none of the ugly-sounding mob-mirth in it, but to Antonio it pealed out like the knell of doom.
“Get out!” commanded Dum-dum. “Sittin' in a kerridge while your betters stand in the 'ot sun! The bloomin' idea!”
Dum-dum made a move to the carriage wheel, and in an instant he was joined by fifty others. They turned it over, and released the horses, but Antonio landed on his feet; he was surrounded now, though, and cut off from all escape. The uniformed, grinning crowd drew back, and left him with Dum-dum, standing in the middle of a circle.
“This 'ere marriage ain't a-goin' to take place!” asserted Dum-dum truculently.
“No?” said Antonio. “Why not?”
“Because h-I says so! There's a tank o' stinkin' water two 'undred yards from 'ere—unless you wants a bath more than usual extry, you'd better swear off marryin'!”
“How about that seventy rupees?” shouted a voice from somewhere in the crowd. “Ask him to explain that!”
“Ay! Make him give up the seventy dibs!”
“I will not!” said Antonio, chin up; and the soldiers left off laughing.
“'E'd rather 'ave the seventy than the gal!” sneered Dum-dum. “Come on—let's duck 'im!”
“Compared to you,” said Antonio quietly, “I am a rich man—ver-ee rich. Rupees sevent-ee are nothing—positively nothing—a mere bagatelle!” He snapped his fingers eloquently.
“'And 'em over, then!”
“I will not!”
“'Ear that, you blokes? 'E says 'e's rich, an' yet 'e won't pay like a man! 'Ow's that for a blighter?”
But at that point a Highlander joined in. He stepped up to Antonio, and laid a huge hand on his shoulder; the little man wilted in terror at the touch.
“Mon, y're ain frien's have left ye. Ye're in the wrong. Why else did they leave ye?”
“They? Bee-cause they are colored men!” declared Antonio, his breast swelling visibly. “Their great-great-grandfathers were black!”
A hurricane of laughter greeted that reply; the soldiers roared until the native population came running out through the city gate to find out what was happening. A party ran, too, from the chapel, and the Goanese priest sent a messenger to find out the cause of the delay.
“Bah! Duck 'im, an' get it over!” shouted Dum-dum. “What's the use o' talkin'?” But again the Scotsman intervened
“Na-na! Wait a wee! Let's hear what the mon has to say.”
It was evident that Antonio did have something to say, for he had cleared his throat; and though his eyes were wild and the sweat was running down his face onto his concertina-ed collar, he thrilled with determination.
“Why shall I not marry?” he demanded, facing Dum-dum, and looking at him straight between the eyes.
“Because you're a dirty little 'undredth-part Portuguee an' she ain't!”
“And, the dee-ference, for instance, between you and me is——”
“I ain't goin' to marry the gal!”
“But the dee-ference?”
Dum-dum was getting rattled; he preferred to do the cross-examining himself.
“The difference? Why, you're a dirty little black cur—that's the diff'rence!”
“Ah! So that is it? Do you dare fight me—with your feests? You, who are not a cur? It is you and I who have the quarr-el, is it not?”
“D'ye ear that, mates? 'E wants to fight me—'im!”
“The mon's a mon!” declared the Highlander, looking down at Antonio with something of a twinkle in his eye. The jeers of the crowd gave place to laughter and squeals of merriment.
“Go on, Dum-dum! Fight him! You're challenged—can't refuse! Mustn't show the white feather! Make a ring! Fetch two buckets, some one!”
Antonio began to peel his clothes, and as each fresh article came off, the soldiers shrieked with laughter. He took off the wonderful Prince Albert, and folded it, and laid it in the dust—unhitched the pink-striped dickie—laid it on the coat lovingly—and stood in a Joseph-colored cotton shirt and flowered suspenders, waiting. He looked like a scarecrow that somebody had robbed, but his eye was steady now.
“I need a second!” he demanded.
“Fetch one of 'is pals back, then!” ordered Dum-dum.
“No. They are colored men. They are not my class! I need a proper second, one befitting my condition!”
That brought out another roar of delight, but there was a sudden silence when the gigantic Highlander stepped up to him.
“I'll gie ye a knee, mon—ye're a plucked 'un!” He smiled, and stooped, and picked up Antonio's coat.
The thing was beyond a joke now, and Dum-dum began to peel his tunic off.
“Hell!” he shouted, turning to the crowd behind him. “H-I can't fight 'im! Why, s'elp me Gawd, I can lick 'im with one 'and!”
But the consensus of opinion seemed to be against him; military etiquette is strict, and a challenge is a challenge. Off came Dum-dum's tunic, and he tossed it to a man behind him.
“We ought to ha' done what I said,” he grumbled. “We ought to ha' gone straight to the chapel, an' stopped the weddin' there.”
“A priest's a priest!” answered a private of the Connaughts, and a murmuring chorus of approval showed that the Irishmen had vetoed that part of the proceedings. Half-breed or not, they will respect the cloth if not the man who wears it. Poor little Antonio, with the grim, gaunt Highlander behind him, stood and pulled his courage up out of his boots, and prayed that a priest might come like the spirit of Aladdin's lamp and save him.
“Three-minute rounds!” shouted somebody. “Take your corner, Dum-dum! Mind 'e don't slip one over on you!”
“Blast 'im, 'e killed my dawg!” swore Dum-dum, searching for a salve for his none-too-sensitive conscience; it was pricking him now for the first time in his recollection. In the first place, Antonio was barely half his size. And all the regiment, or nearly all of it, was looking on.
“Time!” called a self-appointed referee, and Antonio stepped out bravely into the middle of the cleared space, and stood there waiting, with his fists clenched. He clenched them as a woman does, with the thumbs inside, and he held them like a runner at his second mile.
“Gawd! 'Ere, mates, I can't stand this! I'm a white man! I can't fight a Goanese!”
Antonio Braganza stood still, breathing heavily, and praying for the fortune that is said to favor brave men. He took one glance behind him, and noticed that his Highland second was smiling through puckered eyes; that gave him a little confidence, but not much.
“Time's called!” said the Highlander. “Ma mon's waitin'!”
Dum-dum squared himself, and struck a fighting attitude, and looked his adversary over. Then he threw his hands up, and drew back again.
“Gawd! I ain't a h-excutioner! I can't stand this!”
“Will ye fight?” the Highlander demanded. “Ma mon's a-weary o' waitin' for ye to begin!”
“No—so 'elp me Gawd, I won't fight that! There can't be no fight wi' a thing like that!”
“I told ye ma mon's waitin'. I asked ye, will ye fight?”
“And I said 'no!'—you! This 'ud be bloomin' murder! I could get ten year in jail for it!”
“Then, count him oot!” roared the Scotsman; and like a flash, the whole crowd saw the humor of it.
“Seven—eight—nine—ten!” they roared in unison. “He's out!”
“Ma mon wins! He's proved himself a mon! He's won the lassie!”
The giant seized Antonio by both elbows, and tossed him up sky-high. A sea of helmets rose to greet him, and a roar went up that told Antonio his erstwhile enemies were friends.
“His lassie's waitin' for him!” yelled the Highlander, swinging him aloft again.
“And the priest—the priest's waiting,” shouted the Connaughts.
“Where's his best man? Where are his pals?”
“—his pals! I'm his best mon!” And up went Antonio again.
“The carriage, then! Put in the horses!”
“Dom the horses! Mak' Dum-dum pull him!”
That was a grand idea, and there was a swirl and a rush to look for Dum-dum; but that gentleman had vanished. They caught sight of him making at the double for the hill where the barracks were.
A minute later the carriage was standing on its wheels again; three minutes after that, it stopped with a jerk before the little chapel, and, carried aloft by an enormous Highlander amid a swarming mob of laughing soldiers, Antonio was borne into the chapel to be married—with unregulation military honors—to a quartermaster-sergeant's daughter.
He found his three friends waiting for him by the altar; they had slipped round by another road and had said nothing of Antonio's predicament. Cortez, the best man, stepped up to Antonio's side.
“What are niggers doing here?” asked Antonio with dignity. “This is the wedding of a gentleman.”
So they threw the “niggers” out until Antonio Fernandez de Braganza and Alexandra Eulalia Sophia Hendon had been made legal man and wife.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1940, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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