Part 5 (1/2)
I find it impossible to remember nearly all I have seen and heard in one of these bustling days; I should think that even a resident, long familiar with all these everyday common sights that are so new and interesting to us, could barely remember the ceremonies of one day in connection with the Royal Visit.
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I remember a dock was opened to-day, and we were favoured with tickets which gave us an admirable view. Again there were shears, at the bottom of a place like a Greek theatre, very large shears this time, and a stone suspended from them. The Prince and Princess came down a wide flight of steps to a platform with two thrones on it. Behind them at the top of the steps were splendid Ionic pillars and a pediment swagged with great wreaths of green. The Prince was followed by officers and ladies and leading Bombay citizens mixed with only a few Indian princes. Sir Walter Hughes of the Harbour Trust presented a magnificent piece of silver in the shape of a barque of the time of Charles II., with high stem and forecastle and billowy sails, guns, ports, standing rigging, and running gear complete, including waves and mermaids, and all made in the School of Art here to Mr Burns' instructions. We sat opposite, in half circles of white uniforms and gay parasols and dresses and dreams of hats. Behind us and all around and outside the enclosure were thousands of natives in thousands of colours. There were speeches, of course, and the Prince touched a b.u.t.ton and the stone descended into the bowels of the earth and made the beginning of the new dock.
Then everyone got their carriages, gharries, bicycles, pony carts, dog carts or whatever they came in, as best they could, and we all went trotting, cantering, jambing, galloping, go-as-you-please down the central thoroughfare between high houses of semi-European design, with verandahs and balconies full of natives. The crowds on the pavement stood four or five deep all the way, and hung in bunches on the trees, some in gay dresses, others naked, brown and glistening against the dusty fig trees, stems, and branches. You saw all types and colours, one or two seedy Europeans amongst them, and Eurasians of all degrees of colour, one, a beautiful girl of about twelve I saw for a second as we pa.s.sed; she had curling yellow hair and white skin, might have sat for one of Millais pictures, and she looked out from the black people with very wide blue eyes, at the pa.s.sing life of her fathers. Most of us made for the Yacht Club for tea on the lawn; for the Prince, it had been said, was to visit it informally, so all the seats and tables on the lawn were booked days before!
It was rather pretty there; I should not wonder that Watteau never actually saw anything so beautiful. There were, such elegant ladies and costumes, and such an exquisite background, the low wall and the soft colour of the water beyond; the colour calm water takes when you look to the East and the sun is setting behind you, the colour of a fish's silver. And the lawn itself was fresh green; trees stood over the far end of the Club House, and under these the band played. When the lights began to glow along the sea wall and in the Club, and under the trees to light the music, the Prince and the Princess, with Lady Ampthill and Lord Lamington, came and walked up and down and spoke to people, and all the ladies stood up from their tea tables as they pa.s.sed, and I tell you it was good; such soft glowing evening colours and gracious figures, such groups there were to paint--my apologies for the hasty attempt herewith. The Prince you may discover in grey frock-coat speaking to the Bandmaster of the 10th Hussars, the Princess and Lady Ampthill near.
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I've worked at Sat.u.r.day's pictures and Sunday's and written my journal, and seen Royal sights all day till now, and _opus terrat_ and it is late and hot, and the mosquitos tune up--the beast that is least eating the beast that is biggest; the beast that is biggest to sleep if it may.
CHAPTER X
... Went this morning with Krishnaswami of Madras--Krishna is my ”Boy,”
and is aged about forty--to Army and Navy Stores for clothes. The thinnest I could get at home feel very thick and hot here in this hot November. I'd also to get photograph films, and guitar strings, and blankets for the Boy against the cold weather--just now the mere thought of a blanket grills one's mind--also to book shops to get books about India, which I am pretty sure never to have time to read. In my innocence tried to get my return tickets on P. & O. changed to another line, and signally failed to do so. Then drew a little and loafed a good deal on the Bundar watching the lateen-rigged boats. These boats take pa.s.sengers to Elephanta or go off to the s.h.i.+ps in the Bay with cargoes of brightly coloured fruits. The scene always reminds me of that beautiful painting by Tiepolo of the landing of Queen Elizabeth in our National Gallery--I daresay one or two Edinburgh people may know it. The boats are about twenty feet long with narrow beam. Figures in rich colours sit under the little awnings spread over the stern; the sailors are naked and brown, and pole the boats to their moorings with long, glistening bamboos, which they drive into the bottom and make fast at stem and stern. It is pleasant to watch the play of muscle, and att.i.tudes, and the flicker of the reflected blue sky on their brown perspiring backs as they swarm up the sloping yards and cotton sails to brail up. No need for anatomy here, or at home for that matter; if an artist can't remember the reflected blue on warm damp flesh, he does not better matters by telling us what he has learned of the machinery inside--that is, of course, where Michael Angelo did not quite pull it off.
As I sat on the parapet a beautiful emerald fish some four feet long came sailing beneath my feet in the yellowish water; a little boy shouted with glee, and a brown naked boatman tried to gaff it, then a brilliant b.u.t.terfly, velvet black and blue, fluttered through the little fleet; and with the colours of the draperies, of peaceful but piratical looking men, the lateen sails, and sunlight and heat, it all felt ”truly Oriental.” To bring in a touch of the West, one of the ”Renown's” white and green launches with bra.s.s funnels rushed up and emptied a perfect cargo of young Eastern princes in white muslins, and pink, orange, and green turbans with floating tails to them. They clambered up the stone slip with their bear leader and got into carriages with uniformed drivers, six or more into each carriage quite easily; the basket trick seems nothing to me now--they were such slips of lads--but what colour!
At lunch we talked with Miss M. She gave us the latest s.h.i.+p news about our late fellow pa.s.sengers--the mutual interest has not quite evaporated yet--gave us news of the ladies who had come out to be married. She had asked one of these as they came off the s.h.i.+p into the tender what it was she carried so carefully, and the reply was, ”My wedding cake,” and of a poor man, she told us, who came on at Ma.r.s.eilles bringing out his fiancee's trousseau, and who found on his arrival here, he had utterly lost it! What would the latter end of that man be; would she forgive?
Could she forget? It was said that another lady, finding the natives were in the habit of going about without clothes, booked a return pa.s.sage by the next s.h.i.+p.
Here is a jotting at this same landing place of the Prince and Princess going off to the Guard s.h.i.+p, but I am so sorry it is not reproduced in colour. They were to have gone to the Caves of Elephanta across the bay, but had not time. They apparently go on and on, without any ”eight hour” pause, through the procession of engagements--it must be dreadfully fatiguing.
You see three Eurasians in foreground of the sketch, one of them with almost white hair and white skin, and freckles and blue eyes, he might be Irish or York s.h.i.+re. The two younger boys are, I think, his brothers--they have taken more after their mother. All three are nervous and excited watching for the Prince. They are neatly dressed in thin clothes, through which their slightly angular figures show, and have nervous movements of hand to mouth, and quick gentle voices, slightly staccato, what is called ”chee chee,” I believe.
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Beyond the boys you see a Parsi woman looking round. They are conspicuous people in Bombay by their look of intense harmlessness. The men are very tidy and wear what they probably would describe as European clothes, trousers and long cutaway coats and white turndown collars.
Some have grey pot hats, with a round moulding instead of a brim, but their ordinary hat is something like a mitre in black lacquer, and it does suggest heat! They all have very brainy-looking heads from the youth upwards, and wear gla.s.ses over eyes that have no quickness--as if they could count but couldn't see--and they constantly move their long, weakly hands in somewhat purposeless angular fas.h.i.+on; the women with similar movements frequently pat their front hair which is plastered down off their foreheads, and shade their eyes with their hands at a right angle to their wrists.
I suppose they and the Bengalis are the backbone of Indian mercantile business. Yet in ”India,” by Sir Thomas Holdich, I read that out of the population of 287,000,000 the Parsis do not number even one-tenth of a million. It seems to me that we have the Parsi woman's type at home in some of our old families, as we have remains of their Zoroastrian fire-wors.h.i.+p. I've seen one or two really beautiful and highly cultured, but the average is just a little high-shouldered and floppy, and their noses answer too closely to Gainsborough's description of Mrs Siddons'.
Mrs Siddons is just the Parsi type glorified.
We went to the ladies gymkana to-day more for the sake of the drive, I think, than for anything else--with the utmost deference to ladies, they can be seen at home--a few people played Badminton by lamplight; it was dusky, damp, and warm, and heavy matting hung round the courts. Outside an orange sunset shone through palm stems, and flying foxes as big as fox terriers pa.s.sed moth-like within arms length. From the height we were on we looked down over the Back Bay, and far below in the twilight we could make out the lights from a few boats on the sand, and fishermen's lamps flickered across the mud flats, and from far out in the west a light kept flas.h.i.+ng from an island that was the haunt of pirates the other day. Two more lights we saw were glowing to the south-east in Bombay itself--one, the light of the native fair, and a slight glow from the remains of the Bombay and Baroda Railway Offices, a great domed building that burned up last night after the illuminations.
It was madness to cover public buildings with open oil lamps and leave them to be looked after by natives--this huge Taj hotel, dry as tinder outside, a complexity of dry wooden jalousies and balconies, was covered with these lights and floating flags--how it didn't go off like a squib was a miracle. I saw one flag gently float into a lamp, burn up and fall in flaming shreds and no one was the wiser or the worse. The faintest breath of air one way or the other and the other flags would have caught fire, and in a second it would have run everywhere.
... After the Ladies Club, pegs and billiards inside the Yacht Club, the Bombay ladies outside on the green lawn at tea, gossip, hats, local affairs, and Imperialism, and beyond them the s.h.i.+ps of the fleet picked out with electric lights along the lines of their hulls and up masts and funnels like children's slate drawings.
It was interesting to come from the street and the crowds of Parsis and natives all so slenderly built and watch the British youth in s.h.i.+rt sleeves and thin tweeds playing billiards--they were not above the average physique of their cla.s.s, mostly young fellows who had already been through campaigns--and you noted the muscles showing through their thin clothes and compared them with native figures, and it did not seem surprising that one of them could keep in order quite a number of such wisps as the billiard markers for example. But up north they say the natives are stronger and bigger than here.
Every now and then a boy pa.s.sed round bags of chalk on hot water enamelled plates to dry the players' hands and cues, which gives one an idea of the damp heat of Bombay.
... Now my friend says he's off to dress, and we go into the dressing-room--that is a sight for a nouveau! Dozens of dark men in white linen clothes and turbans are waiting on these little chaps from home, as they drop in. They are tubbed and towelled, s.h.i.+rts studded and put on, and are fitted without hardly lifting a hand themselves till they put the finis.h.i.+ng touch to hair and moustache at the gla.s.ses and dressing-tables that are fixed round the pillars--sounds like effeminacy, but it is not, for it is far more tiring for a man to be dressed here by two skilful servants than it is to dash into his clothes at home by himself. If you were to dress here without help you might as well have dropped into your bath all standing, you would be so wet and uncomfortable; but all the same I think it is stupid the way we people cling to a particular style of evening dress regardless of circ.u.mstances.