And in the courtyard of the headman's house
they surrounded him with heavy sticks and worked themselves into anger
against him, each man exciting his neighbour. He was a Pathan. He knew
what that sort of talk meant. A man cannot collect debts without making
enemies. So he warned them. Again and again he warned them, saying:
'Leave me alone. Do not lay hands on me.' But the trouble grew worse,
and he saw it was intended that he should be clubbed to death like a
jackal in a drain. Then he said, 'If blows are struck, I strike, and I
strike to kill, because I am a Pathan,' But the blows were struck, heavy
ones. Therefore, with the very Afghan knife that had cut up the mutton,
he struck the headman. 'Had you meant to kill the headman?' 'Assuredly!
I am a Pathan. When I strike, I strike to kill. I had warned them again
and again. I think I got him in the liver. He died. And that is all
there is to it, sahibs. It was my life or theirs. They would have taken
mine over my freely given meats. Now, what'll you do with me?'
In the long run, he got several years for culpable homicide.
'But,' said I, when the tale had been told, 'whatever made the lower
court accept all that village evidence? It was too good on the face of
it,'
'The lower court said it could not believe it possible that so many
respectable native gentle could have banded themselves together to tell
a lie.'
'Oh! Had the lower court been long in the country?'
'It was a native judge,' was the reply.
If you think this over in all its bearings, you will see that the lower
court was absolutely sincere. Was not the lower court itself a product
of Western civilisation, and, as such, bound to play up - to pretend to
think along Western lines - translating each grade of Indian village
society into its English equivalent, and ruling as an English judge
would have ruled? Pathans and, incidentally, English officials must look
after themselves.
There is a fell disease of this century called 'snobbery of the soul.'
Its germ has been virulently developed in modern cultures from the
uncomplex bacillus isolated sixty years ago by the late William
Makepeace Thackeray. Precisely as Major Ponto, with his plated dishes
and stable-boy masquerading as footman, lied to himself and his guests
so - but the Book of Snobs can only be brought up to date by him who
wrote it.
Then, a man struck in from the Sudan - far and far to the south - with a
story of a discomposed judge and a much too collected prisoner.
