The piano was indeed hopelessly out of order, but Mottram managed to bring the rebellious notes into a sort of agreement, and there rose from the ragged keyboard something that might once have been the ghost of a popular music-hall song. This is from “At the End of the Passage” collected in Mine Own People (USA) and in Life’s Handicap (UK) both in 1891. A harrowing tale of the loneliness and desperation incurred by men working in the remote stations of the Raj, and the all to easy descent into hallucination and more…
and… John Radcliffe’s “Three Quotations”
DEAR OLD MAN,—Please give bearer a box of cheroots—
Supers, No. I, for preference. They are freshest at the
Club. I’ll repay when I reappear; but at present I’m out of
society, Yours,—“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done very wrong. But perhaps thou didst not think?”
“Nay, but I did think. Father, my honour was lost when that happened that—that happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”
Before we could stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, patted two priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt in to the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman.
Here are the sources of these extracts