Twenty-One Days in India Part 9

[I am an Anglo-Indian cherishing many a burning Anglo-Indian prejudice, and I should be sorry if from what I have written here it does not sufficiently appear that I cherish a burning prejudice against the British Tourist in India, who comes out to get up India and to do India; not against the tourist who comes out to shoot or to play the fool in a quiet unostentatious way.]

As far as I can learn, it is a generally received opinion at home that a man who has seen the Taj at Agra, the Qutb at Delhi, and the Duke at Madras, has graduated with honours in all questions connected with British interests in Asia; and is only unfitted for the office of Governor-General of India from knowing too much.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.

No. XX

MEM-SAHIB

"Her life is lone. He sits apart; He loves her yet: she will not weep, Tho' rapt in matters dark and deep He seems to slight her simple heart.

"For him she plays, to him she sings Of early faith and plighted vows; She knows but matters of the house, And he, he knows a thousand things."

[December 20, 1879.]

I first met her shepherding her little flock across the ocean. She was a beautiful woman, in the full sweetness and bloom of life. [The mystery of early wifehood and motherhood gave a pensiveness to her soft eyes; but her voice and manner disclosed the cheerful confidence of perfect health and a pure heart.] Her talk was of the busy husband she had left, the station life, the attached servants, the favourite horse, the garden, and the bungalow. Her husband would soon follow her, in a year, or two years, and they would return together; but they would return to a silent home--the children would be left behind. She was going home to her mother and sisters; but there had been changes in this home. So her thoughts were woven of hopes and fears; and, as she sat on deck of an evening, with the great heart of the moon-lit sea palpitating around us, and the homeless night-wind sighing through the cordage, she would sing to us one of the plaintive ballads of the old country, till we forgot to listen to the sobbing and the trampling of the engines, and till all sights and sounds resolved themselves into a temple of sentiment round a charming priestess chanting low anthems. She would leave us early to go to her babies. She would leave us throbbing with mock heroics, undecided whether we should cry, or consecrate our lives to some high and n.o.ble enterprise, or drink one more gla.s.s of hot whiskey-and-water. She was kind, but not sentimental; her sweet, yet practical "good-night" was quite of the work-a-day world; we felt that it tended to dispel illusions.

She had three little boys, who were turned out three times a day in the ultimate state of good behaviour, tidiness, and cleanliness, and who lapsed three times a day into a state of original sin combined with tar and ship's grease. These three little boys pervaded the vessel with an innocent smile on their three little faces, their mother's winning smile. Every man on the ship was their own familiar friend, bound to them by little interchanges of biscuits, confidences, twine, and by that electric smile which their mother communicated, and from which no one wished to be insulated. Yes, they quite pervaded the vessel, these three little innocents, flying that bright and friendly smile; and there was no description of mischief suitable for three very little boys that they did not exhaust. The ingenuity they squandered every day in doing a hundred things which they ought not to have done was perfectly marvellous. Before the voyage was half over we thought there was nothing left for them to do; but we were entirely mistaken. The daily round, a common cask would furnish all they had to ask; to them the meanest whistle that blows, or a pocket-knife, could give thoughts that too often led to smiles and tears.

Their mother's thoughts were ever with them; but she was like a hen with a brood of ducklings. They pa.s.sed out of her element, and only returned as hunger called them. When they did return she was all that soap and water, loving reproaches, and tender appeals could be; and as they were very affectionate little boys, they were for the time thoroughly cleansed morally and physically, and sealed with the absolution of kisses.

I saw her three years afterwards in England. She was living in lodgings near a school which her boys attended. She looked careworn.

Her relations had been kind to her, but not warmly affectionate. She had been disappointed with the welcome they had given her. They seemed changed to her, more formal, narrower, colder. She longed to be back in India; to be with her husband once more. But he was engrossed with his work. He wrote short letters enclosing cheques; but he never said that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, that she must come out to him, or that he must go to her. He could not have grown cold too? No, he was busy; he had never been demonstrative in his affection; this was his way. And she was anxious about the boys. She did not know whether they were really getting on, whether she was doing the best for them, whether their father would be satisfied. She had no friends near her, no one to speak to; so she brooded over these problems, exaggerated them, and fretted.

The husband was a man who lived in his own thoughts, and his thoughts were book thoughts. The world of leaf and bird, the circ.u.mambient firmament of music and light, shone in upon him through books. A book was the master key that unlocked all his senses, that unfolded the varied landscape, animated the hero, painted the flower, swelled the orchestra of wind and ocean, peopled the plains of India with starvelings and the mountains of Afghanistan with cut-throats. Without a book he moved about like a shadow lost in some dim dreamland of echoes.

Everyone knew he was a scholar, and his thoughts had once or twice rung out to the world clear and loud as a trumpet-note through the oracles of the Press. But in society he was shy, awkward, and uncouth of speech, quite unable to marshal his thoughts, deserted by his memory, abashed before his own silences, and startled by his own words. Any fool who could talk about the legs of a horse or the height of the thermometer was Prospero to this social Caliban.

He felt that before the fine instincts of women his infirmity was especially conspicuous, and he drifted into misogyny through bashfulness and pride; and yet misogyny was incompatible with his scheme of life and his ambition. He felt himself to be worthy of the full diapason of home life; he desired to be as other men were, besides being something more.

[Greek: Kakon gynaikes all' h.o.m.os, o daemotai, Ouk estin oikein oikian aneu kakou.

Kai gar to gaemai, kai to mae gaemai, kakon.]

So he married her who loved him for choosing her, and who reverenced him for his mysterious treasures of thought.

There was much in his life that she could never share: but he longed for companionship in thought, and for the first year of their married life he tried to introduce her to his world. He led her slowly up to the quiet hill-tops of thought where the air is still and clear, and he gave her to drink of the magic fountains of music. Their hearts beat one delicious measure. Her gentle nature was plastic under the poet's touch, wrought in an instant to perfect harmony with love, or tears, or laughter. To read aloud to her in the evening after the day's work was over, and to see her stirred by every breath of the thought-storm, was to enjoy an exquisite interpretation of the poet's motive, like an impression bold and sharp from the matrix of the poet's mind. This was to hear the song of the poet and Nature's low echo. How tranquilising it was! How it effaced the petty vexations of the day!--"softening and concealing; and busy with a hand of healing."

Tale tuum carmen n.o.bis, divine poeta, Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum Dulcis aquae saliente sitim restinguere rivo.

But with the advent of babies poetry declined, and the sympathetic wife became more and more motherly. The father retired sadly into the dreamland of books. He will not emerge again. Husband and wife will stand upon the clear hill-tops together no more.

Neither quite knows what has happened; they both feel changed with an undefined sorrow, with a regret that pride will not enunciate. She is now again in India with her husband. There are duties, courtesies, nay, kindnesses which both will perform, but the ghost of love and sympathy will only rise in their hearts to jibber in mockery words and phrases that have lost their meaning, that have lost their enchantment.

"O love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

"Its pa.s.sions will rock thee As the storms rock the raven on high; Bright reason will mock thee Like the sun from a wintry sky.

"From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter When leaves fall and cold winds come."

ALI BABA, K.C.B.

No. XXI

ALI BABA ALONE

THE LAST DAY

"Now the last of many days, All beautiful and bright as thou, The loveliest, and the last is dead, Rise, memory, and write its praise."

[December 27, 1879.]

How shall I lay this spectre of my own ident.i.ty? Shall I leave it to melt away gracefully in the light of setting suns? It would never do to put it out like a farthing rushlight after it had haunted the Great Ornamental in an aurora of smiles. Is Ali Baba to cease upon the midnight without pain? or is he to lie down like a tired child and weep out the spark? or should he just flit to Elysium? There, seated on Elysian lawns, browsed by none but Dian's (no allusion to little Mrs. Lollipop) fawns, amid the noise of fountains wonderous and the parle of voices thunderous, some wag might scribble on his door, "Here lies Ali Baba"--as if glancing at his truthfulness. How is he to pa.s.s effectively into the golden silences? How is he to relapse into the still-world of observation? Would four thousand five hundred a month and Simla do it, with nothing to do and allowances, and a seat beside those littered under the swart Dog-Star of India? Or is it to be the mandragora of pension, that he may sleep out the great gap of _ennui_ between this life and something better? How lonely the Government of India would feel! How the world would forget the Government of India!

Voices would ask:--

Do ye sit there still in slumber In gigantic Alpine rows?

The black poppies out of number Nodding, dripping from your brows To the red lees of your wine-- And so kept alive and fine.

Sometimes I think that Ali Baba should be satisfied with the oblivion-mantle of knighthood and relapse into dingy respectability in the Avilion of Brompton or Bath; but since he has taken to wearing stars the accompanying itch for blood and fame has come:--

How doth the greedy K.C.B.

Delight to brag and fight, And gather medals all the day And wear them all the night.

The fear of being out-medalled and out-starred stings him:--

[Consimili ratione ab eodem saepe timore Macerat invidia, ante oculos ilium esse polentem, Illum aspectari, claro qui incedit honore, Ipsi se in tenebris volvi caenoque queruntur Insereunt partim statuarum et nominis ergo.]

Thus the desire to go hustling up the hill to the Temple of Fame with the other starry hosts impels him forward. If you mix yourself up with K.C.B.'s and raise your platform of ambition, you are just where you were at the A B C of your career. Living on a table-land, you experience no sensation of height. For the intoxicating delights of elevation you require a solitary pinnacle, some lonely eminence. Aut Caesar, aut nullus; whether in the zenith or the Nadir of the world's favour.

But how much more comfortable in the cold season than the chill splendours of the pinnacles of fame, where "pale suns unfelt at distance roll away," is a comfortable bungalow on the plains, with a little mulled claret after dinner. Here I think Ali Baba will be found, hidden from his creditors, the reading world, in the warm light of thought, singing songs unbidden till a few select cronies are wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears they heeded not--before the mulled claret.

To this symposium the A.-D.-C.-in-Waiting has invited himself on behalf of the Empire. He will sing the Imperial Anthem composed by Mr.

Eastwick, and it will be translated into archaic Persian by an imperial Munshi for the benefit of the Man in Buckram, who will be present. The Man in Buckram, who is suffering from a cold in his heart, will be wrapped up in himself and a c.o.c.ked hat. The Press Commissioner has also asked for an invitation. He will deliver a sentiment:--"Quid sit futurum eras fuge quaerere." A Commander-in-Chief will tell the old story about the Service going to the dogs; after which there will be an interval of ten minutes allowed for swearing and hiccuping. The Travelling M.P. will take the opportunity to jot down a few hasty notes on Aryan characteristics for the _Twentieth Century_ before being placed under the table. The Baboo will subsequently be told off to sit on the Member's head. During this function the Baboo will deliver some sesquipedalian reflections in the rodomontade mood. The Shikarry will then tell the twelve-foot-tiger story. Mrs. Lollipop will tell a fib and make tea; and Ali Baba (unless his heart is too full of mulled claret) will make a joke. The company will break up at this point, after receiving a plenary dispensation from the Archdeacon.