Part 7 (2/2)
Alnaver.--We pa.s.s iron trucks with native occupants--not bad looking--paler in colour I think than the natives at Bombay. Acres of cut dry timber, long bits and short bits, are here for the engine's fuel. The smoke of it makes a pleasant scent in the hot dry air. The country becomes a little more open and not quite so interesting perhaps.
Kambarganvi--flatter and less picturesque--nullahs, open ground and cattle, thin jungle on rolling ground extending to a distant edge of table land. We pa.s.s a pool full of buffalo, only their heads are visible above the muddy green water; on the sh.o.r.es and on their backs are little brown nude girls with yellow flowers round their necks; then Dharwar and the Elder Brother on the platform, and we heave a sigh of relief at the end of the first chapter of our Pilgrimage in India.
CHAPTER XIII
DHARWAR
Dharwar Station is not so unlike one we know within two and a half miles of the centre of Scotland. It is almost the same size but there is no village. Though not imposing, I understand it is the nerve centre of some 1,500 miles of The Southern Maharatta Railway.
As we pull up my brother, Colonel and Agent on the platform, remarks, ”Well, here you are, you're looking well--have you any luggage?” and in a twinkling we are driving away, leaving the ”little pick” of luggage to the boy to bring up leisurely. G.'s maid drives off in a princely padded ox cart or dumbie, and we get into a new modern victoria. I am not sure which is the most distinguished, perhaps the dumbie; it is at any rate more Oriental, and its bright red and blue linings, white hood, and two thoroughbred white oxen make a very gay turn-out.
The Agent's bungalow is wide-spreading, flat-roofed, with deep verandah supported on white-washed cla.s.sic pillars, and surrounded by a park.
There are borders of blooming chrysanthemums and China asters, and trees with quaint foliage, and flowering creepers about the house. The flower borders seem to tail away into dry gra.s.s and bushes and trees of the park, and that changes imperceptibly into dry rolling country with scattered trees and bushes.
Lunch is served by waiters in white clothes and bare feet, ”velvet footed waiters” to be conventional, and there is a blessed peace and quietness about our new surroundings. For weeks past we have ever heard our fellows' voices all the day long; what a contrast is this quiet and elbow room to the crowd on the P. & O. and the gun firing and babel of Bombay.
... It is overcast and still; away to the east over the rolling bushy country are heavy showers, but at this spot trees and crops faint for water. We doze in the verandah and wake and doze again, and wonder how this silence--can be real, even the birds seem subdued. We notice E.H.A.'s friends are here in numbers, Mina birds, the Seven Sisters, King Crows, and one of his (E.H.A.'s) enemies comes in as I write, a yellow-eyed frog; he hops in on the matting and looks and looks--I like the unfathomable philosophy in its golden eye. And my brother stops reading Indian politics and calls me outside to see a Horn Bill--all beak, and little head or body to speak of, he sways on a leafless tree and scraiks anxiously for his friends; they are generally in companies of three or four. A little later, as I write beside a reading lamp in G.'s room, a lizard takes a position on the window, and out of the outer darkness comes a moth and lights on to the outside of the pane, and the lizard pecks at it--neither the moth nor the lizard understand gla.s.s--peck, peck, every now and then--trying to get through to the moth--how delightfully human--the perpetual endeavour to get Beyond, without the will or power to see the infinite reflections of the Inside.
As we speculate to-night as to where some of our neighbours on the ”Egypt” may have got to by this time, the post comes in with letters from this one and the other. One is from Mrs Deputy-Commissioner. A few days ago we were altogether in Bombay, melting in the heat, and now we are towards the south of this Peninsula, and she writes from its farthest north: we are in a hot parched country, whilst she and the D.-C. are in camp, sitting over a huge fire of logs in a pine forest.
She writes, ”To-morrow we enter a valley where five bears have recently been seen and pheasants abound,” and the day after ”we shall be at the top of the pa.s.s, 9,000 feet. Rosy snows and golden mists far below us melt into purple depths.”... So this day's journal closes with pleasant thoughts of relatives and pleasant friends in many distant parts of this wide land.
... Sunday.--We arrived here on Friday--the silence is almost oppressive. Great grey clouds roll up from the east all day till evening, when they form solid bluish ranks; each cloud threatens rain which never falls. The stillness in the bungalow is only broken by the occasional cheep, cheep, cheep of the house lizard, a tiny little fellow that lives behind picture frames and in unused jugs and corners. His body is only about an inch and a half long, but his clear voice fills the large rooms and emphasies the silence. Outside it is as quiet; there is the c.h.i.n.k--c.h.i.n.k of the copper-smith bird, like a drop of water at regular intervals into a metal bowl.
The Colonel and G. rode at 8 A.M., and I biked. It is not such interesting country here as what we came through in the train--rolling, stoney, with friable red soil, and hard to ride on. Many dusty roads meet at all angles; along these you meet herds of buffalo and cows driven leisurely by boys or men. Some cows, of errant natures, have logs dangling by a rope from their necks amongst their feet; they can't go off very fast or far with the enc.u.mbrance. They stir up the dust as they go along, and it falls and lies on the children till their dark skins have a bloom like sloe-berries. There are all sorts of birds to look at--kites, crows, vultures, hawks, eagles; with these you can't expect to see game birds, though it looks an ideal country, though perhaps a little waterless, for pheasants and partridges. When I stop I see the side of the road swarms with insect life, ants of various, kinds, black and red, small and big, pegging along the level, and up and down trees, as if the world depended on each individual's particular bustling. There are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate--very hard and strong. I don't know what they are built for--I must consider the matter like the sluggard some day, if I have time, or read about them if that is not a bigger order. What strikes you at first about the white ant is that you never see it unless you lay its works open. His hard-sun-baked protections run up the tree stems or wherever he goes and conceals and protects his soft, white, fleshy body, and if you prise this casing open you may see him getting away as fast as his little legs will take him; really he is a termite you know, like a ”wood louse or worm,” and not an ant. A wonder of the world is how he gets the liquid secretion to fasten the grains of sand together to make his earthen tunnels. If he goes to the top of a house to remove furniture or the like, he builds his tunnel all the way up; and in a thirsty land the top storey of a sun-bitten house does not seem the place to get water: but I must leave this subject to the disquisitions of men of more leisure and greater abilities, and proceed to make some observations on, and jottings of, the figures on the road. Here are women bringing up great round earthenware vases on their heads and little round bra.s.s bowls in their hands, going and coming from a muddy pool in the centre of a waste of dried mud. They go slowly, the walking is rough for bare feet, for the clay is hard and baked and pitted with cows' feet marks. They drink and wash their bowls in the dregs in the pond, the water already so dirty that a self-respecting duck would not swim in it, and wade about stirring up the mud, then fill their bowls and march away with it for domestic uses--this sounds bad, but it looks a great deal worse. The figures though are charming, with balanced bowl on head, and draperies blown into such folds as a Greek would have loved to model.... But their faces!--Phew! when you see them closely, are frightful!
It is difficult to catch their movement; they are so restless. All people who wear loose draperies seem to be so; witness Spanish women, and the Spanish type of women in our Highlands and Ireland, how they keep constantly s.h.i.+fting their shawls.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
... The Club in evening--a tiny club, quite nice after a quiet day in the bungalow. I was introduced to the five men there, who put me through my paces very gently; I just pa.s.sed I think, and no more. ”Play bridge?--No. Billiards?--Not much.” I began to feel anxious and feared they'd try cricket. ”Tennis?--Yes, dote on tennis!” That smoothed things, and then we got on to shooting, and all went off at a canter.
One of my inquisitors, Mr Huddleston, had been in Lumsden's Horse (the Indian contingent in S. Africa), and said he had helped a young brother of mine out of action at Thaban' Chu.[11] Lumsden's Horse got left there and lost heavily. I knew this brother had been ridden off the stricken field on Captain P. Chamney's back under heavy fire, one of these V.C.
doings that were discounted in S. Africa, and knew that two other fellows rode on either side to steady the sanguinary burden. So here was one of the two, and I asked who the other was, and he said, ”Trooper Ducat, but Powell mended your brother's head; didn't you meet him in the Taj Hotel in Bombay?” And I laughed, for I remembered the doctor of the Taj, a rather retiring man, who generally sat alone at a table in the middle of the great dining-room; and that whenever he had friends dining with him, and I looked up, I was safe to find either he or his friends looking across in my direction, why I couldn't make out. Now it was explained! He remembered mending a man's forehead that had been broken by a piece of sh.e.l.l, and concluded from the surname in the Hotel Book, and possibly family likeness, that I was the man, and naturally he would say to his friends, ”Look you at that man over there--wouldn't think he had lost half his head with a pom-pom sh.e.l.l would you? but he did, and I mended it!--It's pretty well done, isn't it? You can hardly see a mark.”
[11] At Battle of Houtneck.
... Then evening service in a tiny church, a quiet, monotonous, gently murmured lesson, and a few verses from the Old Testament about sanguinary battles long ago and exemplary Hebrew warriors--how soothing!
Doors and windows are wide open, and moths fly in and round the lamps from the blue night outside. The air is full of the rattle of the cicada, which is like the sound of a loud cricket, or the 'r--r' of a corncraik's note going on for ever and ever; and the house lizard in the church goes cheep--cheep--cheep every now and then. No one pays any attention to its loud sweet note. Rather pretty Eurasian girls play the organ and sing, and look through their fingers as they pray.
Then we are dismissed, and find ourselves out in the dark, and the longed for rain falling very lightly. The white dressed native servants are there with lamps and bring up the bullock carts, and ladies go off in them with the harness bells aringing. We have ”The Victoria” of the station--and faith, barring the exercise, I'd as soon not walk! Did not Mr H. kill a great Russell viper at the club steps last night, and was not bitten, and so is alive to tell the tale to-day and to-morrow, and to show the skin, three feet long with a chain pattern down the back; the beast!--it won't get out of your path; lies to be trodden on, then turns and bites you, and you're dead in three minutes by the clock.
... To-day, Tuesday--could read a little--temperature down. Found it an entertainment listening to the voices of various callers in the centre hall of the bungalow, of which one half forms the drawing-room, the other half the dining-room. The bedroom doors open into this, and these doors are a foot off the ground, and fail to meet the top of the arches above them by about other two feet. The advantage of this I fail to see, further than that a convalescent or any other person who can't be bothered talking, can if he pleases, listen to others conversing; if, however, he prefers to sleep, he can't!
I got a glimpse of the gaily dressed callers through the transparent purdahs that separate my room on the outside from the verandah. They drove in white dumbies with white bullocks; the carts and harness glistened with vermilion, sky blue, and gold details; the driver, black of course, in livery, with a boy carrying a white yak's tail in black-buck's horn to brush away flies. I was sorry to miss seeing these kind people, but hope to get over the effect of sun, plus cold baths, and return their calls, and so increase my stock of first impressions of Indian life. ”Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions,” Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his ”Twenty-one days in India,” that most amusing Indian cla.s.sic. ”What is it these travelling people put on paper?” he adds. ”Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and subjective.” Crus.h.i.+ng to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his victim, the M.P., ”is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this ludicrous old Shrovetide c.o.c.k, whose ignorance and information leave two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading public.” This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit at Burns, the ”incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for verse”--a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to say in the ”Contemporary Review.”
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