Twenty-One Days in India Part 10

Under such influences Ali Baba may become serious; he may learn from the wisdom of age and be cheered by the sallies of youth. But little Mrs. Lollipop can hardly be called one of the Sallies of his youth.

Sally Lollipop rose upon the horizon of his middle age. She boiled up, pure blanc-mange and roses, over the dark brim of life's afternoon, a blushing sunrise, though late to rise, and most cheerful. Sometimes after spending an afternoon with her, Ali Baba feels so cheered that the Government of India seems quite innocent and bright, like an old ballerina seen through the mists of champagne and limelight. He walks down the Mall smiling upon foolish Under Secretaries and fat Baboos.

The people whisper as he pa.s.ses, "There goes Ali Baba"; and echo answers "Who is Ali Baba?" Then a little wind of conjecture breathes through the pine-trees and names are heard.

It is better not to call Ali Baba names. Nothing is so misleading as a vulgar nomenclature. I once knew a man who was called "Counsellor of the Empress" when he ought to have had his photograph exposed in the London shop-windows like King Cetewayo, K.C.M.G. I have heard an eminent Frontier General called "Judas Iscariot," and I myself was once pointed out as a "Famine Commissioner," and afterwards as an expurgated edition of the Secretary to the Punjab Government. People seemed to think that Ali Baba would smell sweeter under some other name. This was a mistake.

Almost everything you are told in Simla is a mistake. You should never believe anything you hear till it is contradicted by the _Pioneer_. I suppose the Government of India is the greatest _gobemouche_ in the world. I suppose there never was an administration of equal importance which received so much information and which was so ill-informed. At a bureaucratic Simla dinner-party the abysses of ignorance that yawn below the company on every Indian topic are quite appalling!

I once heard Mr. Stokes say that he had never heard of my book on the Permanent Settlement; and yet Mr. Stokes is a decidedly intelligent man, with some knowledge of Cymric and law. I daresay now if you were to draw off and decant the law on his brain, it would amount to a full dose for an adult; yet he never heard of my book on the Permanent Settlement. He knew about Blackstone; he had seen an old copy once in a second-hand book shop; but he had never heard of my work! How loosely the world floats around us! I question its objective reality.

I doubt whether anything has more objectivity in it than Ali Baba himself. He was certainly flogged at school. Yet when we now try to put our finger on Ali Baba he eludes the touch; when we try to lay him he starts up gibbering at Cabul, Lah.o.r.e, or elsewhere. Perhaps it is easier to imprison him in morocco boards and allow him to be blown with restless violence round about the pendant world, abandoned to critics: whom our lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling.

[Ali Baba! I know not what thou art, but know that thou and I must part; and why or where and how we met, I own to me's a secret yet. Ali Baba, we've been long together through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'tis hard to part when things are dear, bar silver, piece cloth, bottled beer, then steal away with this short warning: choose thine own winding-sheet, say not good-night here, but in some brighter binding, sweet, bid me good morning.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.

EXTRACTS FROM _SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS_.

BY "OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN."

_The Bombay Gazette Press_, 1881.

No. x.x.xIV

THE TEAPOT SERIES

SOCIAL DISSECTION

[January 5, 1880.]

GOSSIP I.

MY DEAR MRS. SMITH,

I cannot understand why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd figure--for really I can apply no other adjective to it--should wear that most absurdly tight dress. Some one should tell her what a fright it makes of her.

She is nothing but convexities. She looks exactly like an hour-gla.s.s, or a sodawater machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell whether she is coming to you, or going away from you. She looks just the same all round. People call her smile sweet; but then it is the mere sweetness of inanity. It is the blank brightness of an empty chamber. She sheds these smiles upon everyone and everything, and they are felt to be cold like moonshine. Speaking for myself, these _eau-sucre_ smiles could not suckle my love. I would languish upon them. My love demands stronger drink. Mrs. Smith's features are good, no doubt. Her eyes are good. An oculist would be satisfied with them.

They have a cornea, a crystalline lens, a retina, and so on, and she can see with them. This is all very satisfactory, I do not deny, as far as it goes. Physiologically her eyes are admirable; but for poetry, for love, or even for flirting, they are useless. There is no significance in them, no witchery, no suggestiveness. The aurora of beautiful far-away thoughts does not coruscate in them. Her eyelids conceal them, but do not quench them. They would be nothing for winking, or tears. If she winked at me, I should not jump into the air, as if shot in the spine, with my blood tingling to my extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum; my blushes would not come perspiring through my whiskers. Her winking would altogether misfire. Why? Because her winking would be physiological and not erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would not be for any lovelight in her eye; it would never be the quick, fierce, hot, biting electric pa.s.sion of the fleshly poets, it would be what a chemist might call the "eremacausis" kindled by habit. Mrs. Smith's tears are quite the poorest product of the lachrymal glands I have ever seen. They are simply a form of water. They might dribble from an effete pump; they might leak from a worn-out _mashq_.[AA] I observe them with pity and regret. Their drip has no echo in my bosom; it produces no stalact.i.tes of sympathy in my heart.

I have often been told that her nose was good--and good it unquestionably is--good for blowing; good for sneezing; good for snoring; good for smelling; a fine nose for a catarrh. But who could play with it? Who could tweak it pa.s.sionately, as a prelude to kissing? Who could linger over it tenderly with a candle, or a lump of mutton fat, when cold had laid its cruel hand upon it? It is not tip-tilted like a flower; it is not whimsical with some ravishing and unexpected little crook. It is straight, like a mathematical line. But it has no parts. Her cheeks are round and fair. Each has its dimple and blush. They are thoroughly healthy, Mrs. Smith's digestion is unexceptionable. You might indicate the contour of these cheeks with a pair of compa.s.ses; you might paint them with your thumb. Poor Mrs.

Smith's talk, or babble rather, is of her husband, her children, her home. It is a mere purring over them. She never cuts them to pieces, and holds them up to scorn and mockery. She never penetrates their weaknesses. She does not even understand that Smith is a common-place, stereotyped kind of fellow, exactly like hundreds of other men in his cla.s.s. She does not appear to notice the ghastly defects in his education, tastes, and character, which gape before all the world else. She does not see that he is without the _morbidezza_ of culture; that he finds no _appogiatura_ in art; that he never rises at midnight, amid lightning and rain, to emit an inarticulate cry of aesthetic anguish in some metrical construction of the renaissance period. She does not miss in him that yearning after the unattainable, which in some mysterious wise fills us with a mute despair; which has in it yet I know not what of sweetness amid the delirious aspirations with which it distracts us. She cannot know, with her base instincts dragging her down to the hearth-level of home and child, the material gracelessness of her husband, equally incapable of striking an Anglo-Saxon, or a mediaeval att.i.tude; and with his blood flushed, healthy face unable to realize in his expression that divine sorrow which can alone distinguish the man of culture from ordinary Englishmen, or the anthropoid apes. She will never know what vibrates so harshly on us--the want of feeling for colour which is displayed in the coa.r.s.e tone of his brown hair. So in regard to her children, the mind of Mrs. Smith is quite uncritical. Look at that baby, like a thousand other babies you see every day. It has not a single idiosyncrasy on which anyone above the intellectual level of a _cretin_ could hang an affection. Its porcine eyes twinkle dimly through rolls of fat; it splutters and puffs, and its habits are simply abominable. What a gross home for that life's star, which hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar! The star is quenched in fat; it has exchanged the music of the spheres for a hideous caterwauling! Yet Mrs. Smith loves that child, and gobbles over it, descending to its abysses of grossness.

Her house is one of many in a long unlovely street; it is furnished according to the most corrupt dictates of b.e.s.t.i.a.l Philistinism--that is, with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion, concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye and foolish heart, loves this wretched shelter, and would pour out her idiotic tears if she were leaving it for Paradise.

But if we descend from our aesthetic heights to the lowly level of the biped Smith, we may see Mrs. S. in a totally different atmosphere, and certain lights and shadows will play about her with a radiance not altogether without beauty. She is a single-minded woman, anxious to make her husband and children comfortable and happy in their home,--and dreaming of nothing beyond this. She is full of homely wisdom; a hundred little economies she practises with forethought and unwearying a.s.siduity tend to make her husband and children love her and regard her as a paragon of domestic policy. Her husband's affection and her children's affection are all the world to her; music and painting and poetry, Mr. Ruskin, Phidias, Praxiteles, Holman Hunt, and Mr. Whistler pale away into shadows of shadows in presence of the indications of love she receives from that baby. And this intense single-minded love elevates her within its own compa.s.s. She sees in that baby's eyes the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the mother's dream. She broods over it till she effects for it in her own maternal fancy an apotheosis; and round its image in her heart there glows a bright halo of poetry. She sees through the fat. The grossness disappears before her rapt gaze. There remains the spirit from heaven:--

Sweet spirit newly come from Heaven With all the G.o.d upon thee, still Beams of no earthly light are given Thy heart e'en yet to bless and fill.

Thy soul a sky whose sun has set, Wears glory hovering round it yet; And childhood's eve glows sadly bright Ere life hath deepened into night.

So with the husband; so with the home; a glory gathers round them, which she alone, the intense worshipper, sees; and this unaesthetic Mrs. Smith, altogether unsatisfactory to the artistic eye, most practical, most commonplace, carries within her some of the Promethean flame, and is worthy of that halo of homely joy and affection with which she is crowned.

No. x.x.xV

SAHIB

[February 19, 1880.]

I first met him driving home from cutcherry in his buggy. He was a fat man in the early afternoon of life. In his blue eyes lay the mystery of many a secret salad and unwritten milk-punch; but though he smoked the longest cheroots of Trichinopoly and Dindigul, his hand was still steady and still grasped a cue or a long tumbler, with the unerring certainty of early youth and unshaken health.

Of an evening he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he would "just drop in," as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand fashion, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid genial smiles and a brandishing of his long cheroot, playfully indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which he had been long acquainted.

As he began to glow with conversation and brandy, he would call for cards and play ecarte with me, until the room gradually resolved itself into one of the circles of some Californian Inferno, with a knave of spades digging the diamonds out of my heart and clubbing my trumps.

He would leave me throbbing with the eructation of oaths and the hollow aching of an empty purse, and uncertain whether to give up cards and liquor for hymns and Government paper or whether to call him back and take fortune by storm. But he had gone off with a resolute "good night" that tended to dispel illusions; he had gone to his own No. 1 Exshaw and his French novels, which he read as he lay on his solitary bachelor couch.

Yes,--his bachelor couch, for he was not married. He had loved much and often. He had loved a great many people in different stations of life, but they did not marry him. He was, upon the whole, glad that they did not marry him; for they were often married to other people, and he would have been lonely with one, dissatisfied with two, and embarra.s.sed with more; so he continued his austere bachelor life; and always tried to love unostentatiously somebody else's wife.

He loved somebody else's wife, because he had no wife of his own, and the heart requires love. It was very wrong of him to love somebody else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged to another; but then he had nothing puritanical or pharisaical in his nature; he was too highly cultivated to be moral, and arguing the point in the mood of sweet _Barbara_, he had often succeeded in persuading pretty women that he did right in loving them, though their household duties belonged to another.

I have said that he was too highly cultivated to be religious. He was exceedingly emotional and intellectual; and the procrustean bed of a creed would have been intolerable torture to him. Life throbbed around him in an aurora of skittles. The world of morality only raised a languid smile, or tickled an appet.i.te pleased with novelty. An archdeacon, or a book of sermons delighted him. He would play with them and ponder over them, as if they were old china, or curious etchings. But he was never profane, especially before bishops, or children, and he always went to church on Sunday morning.

He went to church on Sunday morning, because it was quaint and old-fashioned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his acquaintance in their devotional moods and att.i.tudes. There was hardly any mood or att.i.tude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly for other reasons. I suppose he was a student of human nature, though he always repudiated the notion of being a student of anything. He said that life was too short for serious study, and that every kind of pursuit should be tempered with fooling; while to prevent fooling becoming wearisome it should always be dashed with something earnest, as the sodawater is dashed with brandy, or the Government of India with Mr. Whitley Stokes.

Nigrorum memor, dum licet, ignium, Misce stult.i.tiam consiliis brevem: Dulce est desipere in loco.

But besides being a man of pleasure and a capital billiard player, he was a Collector in the North-Western Provinces--a man who sat at the receipt of custom under a punkah, and read his _Pioneer_. The Lord High c.o.c.kalorum at Nynee Tal, Sir Somebody Thingmajig,--I am speaking of years ago--did not like him, I believe; but n.o.body thought any the worse of him for this; and although he continued to be a Collector until the shades of evening, when all his contemporaries had retired into the Dreamland of Commissionerships, he still loved and was loved; and to the very last he read his French novels and quoted Horace, sitting peacefully on the bank while the stream of promotion rolled on, knowing well that it would roll on _in omne aevum_, and not caring a jot whether it did, or did not. What was a seat at the Sadr Board[BB] to him, a seat among the solemn mummies of the service? He would not object to lie in the same graveyard with them; but to sit at the same board while this sensible warm motion of life still continued was too much; this could never be. He belonged to a higher order of spirits. As a boy he had not bartered the music of his soul for Eastern languages and the Rent Law; and as an old man he would not sit in state with corpses faintly animated by rupees.

To the last he mocked promotion; he mocked, till the dread mocker laid mocking fingers on his liver, and till gibe and laughter were silenced for evermore. So the Collector died, the merry Collector; and "where shall we bury the merry Collector?" became the last problem for his friends to deal with. I was in far away lands at the time with another friend of his--we mourned for the Collector.

We would have buried him in soft summer weather under sweet arbute trees, near the sh.o.r.e of some murmuring Italian sea. The west wind should whisper its grief over his grave for ever:--

"Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers."

Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--

"Where through groves deep and high, Sounds the far billow, Where early violets die under the willow.