Departure by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

The Rickshaw

IT WAS ONE hundred twenty degrees in the shade but I walked back to the Press Club because I had principles, and one of them was that I would not be drawn by a man who serves the function of a beast. I had lately come from the North, where sometimes it was one hundred forty degrees in the shade, but it was dry there, and in an hour you could dehydrate yourself completely, yet never get a drop of moisture on your shirt. It was not dry here; it was wet, and I got wet, underwear, shirt, pants and all. So I plodded along most uncomfortably, only stopping once in a while beside the ghats, to watch the carefree natives swimming and diving. It looked cool and inviting, but I tempered my envy with the superior knowledge that these were the most carefully sponsored disease-breeders on earth. It was good to be a white man, wise and knowledgeable—an American among white men, which is even better—and to be able to shower and shave and put on clean clothes and order a Tom Collins and sit under an electric fan while I sipped the drink.

There, at a quarter to five, and feeling comfortably cool, I was started on the second one when the sergeant came along and sat down next to me and asked me what I was doing that night.

“Right here,” I said. “I intend to have one more drink before dinner, and then I will have my dinner, and then I will return here and have enough drinks to become pleasantly drunk, and then I will go to bed.”

“It’s a tough war, Mr. Eldridge,” the sergeant said.

“For some it is,” I agreed. I liked the sergeant, but he was bound to educate me. He was in Signal Service, and getting over something in the general hospital across the road. Now he was at the end of the cure and able to get out each evening, and he liked the food in the Press Club better than what they gave him at the hospital.

“I thought you would like to go to a meeting tonight,” he said apologetically, “because there are some people here who would like to see you and talk to you, because you’re an American writer, I mean. I mean, there are some trade-union people and some writers, and they would like to talk to you.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s fine.”

“I mean you don’t have to go if you don’t want to go, but I told them I thought you would.”

“You told them that?”

“Well, I’ve been eating on you, so I thought something like this—”

“Look, I walked four miles to get back here, and then I took a shower, and now I feel comfortable and cool for the first time today.”

“Why didn’t you take a rickshaw?”

I explained carefully and slowly that I did not like to be drawn by a man as by a beast. It was a principle, a very small principle. I explained to the sergeant that I still had to have a principle—just one small principle.

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