330 OWEN BERKELEY-HILL
The place stinks o' money — ^just kept out o' sight. Do you ever know a native that didn't say Garib adnii (I'm a poor man)? They've been sayin ' Garib admi so long that the Guv'ment learns to believe 'em, and now they're all bein' treated as though they was paupers. I'm a pauper, an' you're a pauper — we' aven't got any thing hid in the ground^an' so's every white man in this forsaken country. But the Injian he's a rich man. How do I know.? Because I've tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place to the other, an' I know what I'm talkin' about, and this 'ere Guv'ment goes peckin' an' fiddlin' over its tuppenny-ha'penny little taxes as if it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in... It's six " sowars "^ here, and ten "sowars" there, and, "Pay up, you brutes, or we'll pull your ears over your head." And when they've taken all they can get, the headman, he says: "This is a dashed poor yield. I'll come again:" Of course the people digs up something out of the ground, and they pay. I know the way it's done, and that's the way to do it. You can't go to an Injian an' say: "Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?" He says: " Garib admi,' of course, an' would say it if he was as rich as a banker. But if you send half a dozen swords at him and shift the thatch oif of his roof he'll pay. '
Any one who knows India to any appreciable extent will agree that this story gives a lively account of two notable characteristics of the Hindu, namely, his avariciousness and his instinct to hoard.
A far more edifying manifestation of the same complex is, as Ernest Jones ^ observes, ' the great affection that may be displayed for various symbolic objects — and one of the most impressive traits in the whole gamut of the anal character is the extraordinay and quite exquisite tenderness that some members of the type are capable of, especially to children. ' The Hindu is certainly passion- ately fond of children, at any rate of his own children. Children, like money, are faecal symbols * and there is a good deal in Hindu literature which displays evidence of the unconscious association of these two sets of ideas. For instance, the common idea that the baby is created out of faeces is reproduced in the story of the birth of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, who was derived from the excrement of his mother Parvati. Again, at Nan-
' troopers.
- Ernest Jones: op. cit.
' Ernest Jones: op. cit.
