Part 3 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Aden, and Fan-sellers]
This is verbatim from my log and expresses a very little of one's feelings; everyone is so jolly and polite too, you just have to stop, or go on and show temper. Two or three of the pa.s.sengers tried to paint effects, each formed a centre of a group of people, who looked over their shoulders, the onlookers one after another remarking with ingratiating smiles, ”You don't mind my looking, do you?” Why on earth do people look over the shoulders of persons painting, when they would never dream of looking over the shoulder of any one writing?
Notwithstanding the crowd and polite requests to be ”allowed to look,”
and the untenable effort required to give soft answers, I did manage to make a sketch or two at Aden--one of stony hills and government houses in the background, and in the front green water and the vendors of fans and beads, and curious brown, naked, active fellows in sharp stemmed light coloured boats, which they could row! Some of them had turbans, pink or lemon yellow, or white skull caps, and there were also Egyptian officials and soldiers in white uniform and red turbash, in white launches that raced about through the green water, cutting a great dash of white with their bows; there was colour enough, and movement and sun galore.
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I suppose these ”ragged rocks and flinty spires” are the rocks that inspired the Pipe-Major with the cheery farewell to ”The Barren Rocks of Aden”--here they are the rocks you see from Aden--everyone knows the tune.
7th October.--The lady artist and I compared sketches. We both wors.h.i.+p Whistler, and various writers we agree about, but I fear we are only in sympathy so far. I gathered from her to-night that I ought to study native character in India, for our countrymen in India had no picturesqueness, no art about them, and to a.s.sociate with them one had better be at home. I felt saddened and went on deck and saw the people she called ”Anglo-Indians” (more than two-thirds Scots, Irish, Cornish, and Welsh, with a negligible fraction of possible Angles) all lying like dead men in rows, with no side or show about them as they lay; some in contorted positions, with here and there a powerful limb or well rounded northern head showing in the half dark. Rulers of the Indian Empire, by Odin! or Jove! damp and hot, and in the dark, in a strong draught, without a pick of gold lace, prostrate, sweating uncomfortably, sleeping; and travelling as their innumerable predecessors have ever travelled, from the North to rule the South.
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They may be inartistic, but they look mighty touching, pathetic, and wonderful, not only the individual whose legs you step over but that almighty race combine--whatever you call it[4]--which he represents....
Ladies were stealing to their lairs in the zereba on deck, and in the music room; they look quite Eastern, all m.u.f.fled up in tea gowns and gauzy draperies. The music room has only recently been reserved for them at night; a mere man who had camped there with wife and child did not know of the change; and Mrs Deputy-Commissioner told us they were all lying out there in the dark when the man entered in pyjamas and had stepped over a dozen prostrate forms when Mrs D.-C. said incisively, ”We are all ladies here,” and he murmured ”Good Lord,” and his retreat was rapid--what a scare he had!
[4] British or English.
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Only one more day's dull reckoning and we will be ash.o.r.e. I expect everyone is getting rather sick of the crowded life. A fancy dress ball pulled through last night. Most ingenious dresses were made up, and prizes were given to the best. All those in fancy dress formed up and walked past the judges in single file. There were pretty much the usual stock costumes, and nothing original amongst the ladies. The very black-eyed belle with red cheeks wore a mantilla of course, and gripped a fan and had a camellia in her hair, and was called Andalusian, but her walk and expression were ”made in England”--a Spanish girl's expression and walk can't be got up in a day or two.
The-most-beautiful-lady-in-the-s.h.i.+p was--upon my word, I don't know what her dress was called, something of the ”Incroyable” period; whatever it was called, she carried it well and could walk, the rest merely toddled.
She is Australian, still, I'd have given her First Prize. The lady who did get it, was really very pretty, and dressed as a white Watteau or Dresden shepherdess. Amongst the men ”The British Tourist” was perfection--answered all requirements, and suggested the tourist of old and the tourist of to-day; he had check trousers, chop whiskers, a sun hat, umbrella, blue spectacles, and the dash of red Baedeker for colour.
Then an a.s.sistant-Commissioner, an Irishman, was splendidly got up. I'd noticed he had been out of sight a good deal lately--he had been sewing his own clothes, and they were really well made! ”An Eastern Potentate”
he called himself, or a Khedive, and ran to riot in a jumble of orders and jewellery and gold chains. Trousers and jacket were pale cinnamon with scarlet facings and a red turbash, and how well the clothes fitted!
clever Mr B.; he knows so much about many subjects, and can sew! He and my Judge acquaintance were arguing last night. The Judge is a Cornishman. When you get a highly educated Cornishman and an Irishman together, however long they have been in England, and they begin to talk, it's worth while sitting out. B. explained in soft and winning words to the Judge that his life was a giddy round of society, long leave, and high pay, whilst he in the far North led a lonely life of continuous hard work and no pay to speak of; and the Judge, with equal if not greater fluency, described B.'s up-country life as perpetual leave on full pay, a long delightful picnic, and so on and so forth. My sympathy went with the Judge; I think his life is the least pleasant, but one had to allow for his greater rapidity of speech and practice in courts before juries, besides his art studies in Paris. Later R. joined; he is an advocate in Calcutta and hails from the Hebrides. Then came a Welsh Major, a gunner. That made a party of an Irishman, two Scots (one of them anglicised), a Welsh, and a Cornishman, and they discussed everything under the sun except the Celtic Renaissance: for they spend their days on the confines of the Empire, and the brain takes time to make the tail wag.
CHAPTER VIII
[Ill.u.s.tration: B]
Bombay.--I've travelled these three weeks with people who have lived in India, and I have been brought up on Indian books and Indian home letters, and in one way and another have picked up an idea of what the people and the features of nature are like, but I have received only a very faint idea of its real light and colour. I thought Egypt had given me a fair idea of what India might be, but nothing in Egypt can touch what I've seen in these two half days.
Our first view of Bombay from where we lay at anchor a mile off sh.o.r.e was very disappointing. All there is to see is a low sh.o.r.e and a monotonous line of trees and houses; the air was warm and damp and hazy, and the smoke from two or three tall chimneys hung in thin wreaths over land and water. In our immediate neighbourhood steamers were coaling, and their dust did not add any beauty to the picture, and the actual landing is not very interesting; you get off the s.h.i.+p to the wharf in a big launch, a slow process but quietly and well-managed, and on sh.o.r.e have a little trouble about your luggage, even though it may be in the hands of an agent. I'd two or three cab voyages, ”gharry,” I should have said, before I got the best part of ours to the Taj Hotel. There a friend had booked us our rooms before we sailed, and on the morning of our arrival had very thoughtfully secured them with lock and key, so that no unscrupulous Occidental could play on Oriental weakness and bag them before our arrival.
The journeys in the gharry were not entirely successful, and I didn't get all our baggage till next day, but they presented me with one astounding series of beautiful pictures, so that my head fairly reeled with the continuous effort to grasp the way of things and their forms and colours, things in the street, themselves perhaps of no great interest but for the intense colourful light.--There is a water carrier; the sun s.h.i.+nes blue on the back of his brown bare legs and back, and blazes like electric sparks on the pairs of bra.s.s water pots he carries slung across his shoulders. He is jogging along fast, his ”shoulder knot a-creaking,” and the water that splashes on to the hot dust intensifies the feeling of heat and light. Then you catch the flash of silver rings in the dust on a woman's toes as she strides along, and have the unfamiliar pleasure of seeing the human form, G.o.d's image in brown, and note the rounded limbs and bust, and the movement of hip and swinging arm through white draperies, which the sun makes a golden transparency.
What thousands of figures, and all in different costumes or bare skin.
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