I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew
through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken
pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors' book
was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid's head
with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober
traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to
drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still
greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair
proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in
dak-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would
voluntarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many
men have died mad in dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of
lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of
them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's method of
handling them, as shown in "The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other
Stories." I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bungalow. But _that_ was the smallest
part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in
dak-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak-bungalow was old and rotten and
unrepaired.
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