Ch. 23: The Mark of the Beast

Your Gods and my Gods-do you or I know which are the stronger? Native
Proverb.

EAST of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man
being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and
the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and
modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary horrors of life in
India: it may be stretched to explain my story.

My friend Strickland of the Police, who knows as much of natives of
India as is good for any man, can bear witness to the facts of the case.
Dumoise, our doctor, also saw what Strickland and I saw. The inference
which he drew from the evidence was entirely incorrect. He is dead now;
he died, in a rather curious manner, which has been elsewhere described.

When Fleete came to India he owned a little money and some land in the
Himalayas, near a place called Dharmsala. Both properties had been left
him by an uncle, and he came out to finance them. He was a big, heavy,
genial, and inoffensive man. His knowledge of natives was, of course,
limited, and he complained of the difficulties of the language.

He rode in from his place in the hills to spend New Year in the station,
and he stayed with Strickland. On New Year's Eve there was a big dinner
at the club, and the night was excusably wet. When men foregather from
the uttermost ends of the Empire, they have a right to be riotous. The
Frontier had sent down a contingent o' Catch-'em-Alive-O's who had not
seen twenty white faces for a year, and were used to ride fifteen miles
to dinner at the next Fort at the risk of a Khyberee bullet where their
drinks should lie. They profited by their new security, for they tried
to play pool with a curled-up hedgehog found in the garden, and one of
them carried the marker round the room in his teeth. Half a dozen
planters had come in from the south and were talking 'horse' to the
Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once.
Everybody was there, and there was a general closing up of ranks and
taking stock of our losses in dead or disabled that had fallen during
the past year. It was a very wet night, and I remember that we sang
'Auld Lang Syne' with our feet in the Polo Championship Cup, and our
heads among the stars, and swore that we were all dear friends. Then
some of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to open up the
Soudan and were opened up by Fuzzies in that cruel scrub outside Suakim,
and some found stars and medals, and some were married, which was bad,
and some did other things which were worse, and the others of us stayed
in our chains and strove to make money on insufficient experiences.

Fleete began the