Part 8 (1/2)
”I became acquainted in a few weeks with what the majority of our civilian officers spend their lives in only half suspecting. My experience has been that of a tourist, but I have returned satisfied that it is quite possible to see, hear, and understand all that vitally concerns our rule in India in six months' time.”
After all, who may write about India? Major Jones said to me the other day, ”Why on earth is Smith writing about India--what does he know? he is just out; why! I've been here over ten years and have just learned I know nothing.”
Then I said, ”What about General Sir A. B. Blank's writings?” Blank is going home after about forty years in India. ”Oh! good gracious,” he said, ”Blank's ideas are hopeless--utterly antiquated!” Therefore no one may write about India; Smith is too inexperienced, Jones has only learned he knows nothing, and General Blank is too antiquated.
This day we spent calling round the station. The owners of the two first bungalows were out; at the third the hostess carried wreaths of flowers, which she was on her way to place on her native butler's grave; he had died of plague. The next house was full of madonnas and maids wors.h.i.+pping the latest arrival in the station, a chubby boy of six months. The father had retired to a quiet corner, but seeing another mere man, he came out with certain alacrity and suggested a peg and cheroot. The next house was the doctor's, and the Mrs Doctor and I were just getting warm over Ireland, and had got to Athlone, Galway, and Connemara, when the ten minutes, that seem law here, were up, and G.
rose to go, and I'd to leave recollections of potheen, and wet, and peat reek, and ”green beyond green”--such refres.h.i.+ng things even to think of in this Eastern land, especially for us who are on the wander and know we will be home soon. But it must be a different feeling for those people at their posts, tied down by duty, year after year, with the considerable chance of staying in the little bit of a cemetery with others who failed to get home. But we must not touch on this aspect of our peoples life out here, it is too deeply pathetic. At the next house I did actually get a peg, and it was a pleasing change after buffalo milk and quinine for days: and mine host, who had been on the ”West Coast,” told me his experience of pegs in Africa. ”The men,” he said, ”who didn't take pegs there at all, all died for certain, and men who took nips and pegs in excess died too; a few, however, who took them in moderation survived.”
Then we drove towards the sunset and rolling hills, and were overwhelmed with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could remember it exactly. One figure I can still see--there is an open s.p.a.ce, green gra.s.s, and Corot like trees on either side reflected in water, and a girl carrying a black water-pot on her head, crosses the gra.s.s in the rays of the setting sun--a splash of transparent rosy draperies round a slight brown figure.
Friday.--Rode in morning with the Brother, painted and drove with G. in the afternoon, tennis and badminton at club, and people to dinner; that is not such a bad programme, is it? Not exciting, but healthy, bar the excessive number of meals between events,[12] and tiresome in regard to the inevitable number of changes of clothes. The ride we start after an early cup of tea. It begins pleasantly cool, but in an hour you feel the sun hot, and are glad to get in and change to dry clothes, and have breakfast proper about 9 A.M. The Brother then goes to office, which is a building like an extensive hydropathic, on an eminence to which on various roads, at certain hours of the day, streams of tidy native clerks may be seen going and coming. Of what they do when they get there, or where they go when they leave I have no idea; the country all round seems just red, rolling, gritty soil, with th.o.r.n.y bushes and scattered trees! But there is a native town; possibly these men go there, though their costumes are too trim to suggest native quarters.
There is such silence up here on the tableland at mid-day--only a light soughing of the soft, hot wind, otherwise not even the cheep of a lizard. A little later in the afternoon begins the note of a bird, like a regular drop of water into a metal pot, very soft and liquid, and when the gardener waters the flowers, more birds come round to drink. The house too is absolutely still; the servants drowse in their quarters in the compound; G. and her maid in a back room are quiet as mice; they got a sewing machine, which was a very clever thing to do, but it was a tartar, it wouldn't work--that was ”Indian” I expect--so they have had a most happy morning pulling it to bits, and putting it together again--I wonder if they will make it go.
[12] Specially laid on for our benefit.
The most social part of the day here is the meeting at the club after the business day is done. I have not heard Indian club life described, but this club, though small, is, I think, fairly typical. Half the station turns up at it every evening before dinner; I should think there are generally about twenty ladies and men. You bike down, or drive, and play tennis on hard clay courts, a very fast game; then play badminton inside when it gets dark, and the lamps are lit.--I'd never played it before. What a good game it is; but how difficult it is to see the shuttle-c.o.c.k in the half light as it crosses the lamp's rays--A.1.
practice for grouse driving, and a good middle-aged man's game; for reach and quick eye and hand come in, and the player doesn't require to be so nimble on his pins as at tennis. To-night the little station band of little native men played outside the club under the trees, with two or three hurricane lamps lighting their music and serious dark faces, and the flying foxes hawked above them. Inside there was the feeling of a jolly family circle--rather a big family of ”grown-ups”--or a country house party.
Dancing was beginning as we came away; men had changed from flannels to evening dress, and ladies had dumbied home and back, and a bridge tournament was being arranged. Think of the variety of costume this means, and grouping and lights. The brother and G. had come in from riding, G. in grey riding-skirt and white jacket, and the brother in riding-breeches and leggings, and two men and a lady came in with clubs from golf. Other men were in flannels, and some had already got into evening kit, and it was the same with ladies--what a queer mixture.
Everyone seems perfectly independent of everyone else, except one or two matrons who have the interests of the youths at heart, and bustle their ”dear boys” out of draughts, where ”they will sit, after getting hot at Badminton, and won't get ready for dancing or bridge.” One cannot but admire the brotherly and sisterly relations.h.i.+p that seems to exist between these kindly exiles, the way they make the best of things and stand by each other, such a little group of white people, possibly thirty all told, in the midst of a countless world of blacks.
Let us now discourse on duck-shooting for a change, and because it is a safe subject, and like fis.h.i.+ng, ”has no sting in the tail of it.” One of the ”dear boys” at the club asked if I'd care to go duck-shooting on Sunday. This ”youth” is country-bred, and for length and breadth and colour and accent, you'd think he had just come out from the Isle of Skye, the land of his people, where you know they run pretty big and fit.
It was very kind of these fellows I think, asking me to join them. A doubtful bag doesn't matter--it's a new country and I feel as keen as a c.o.c.kney on his first 12th--so I unpack my American automatic five shooter, beside which all last year's single-trigger double-barrel hammer-less ejectors are as flintlocks! ”Murderous weapon, and bloodthirsty shooter”--some old-fas.h.i.+oned gunners of to-day will say, just as our grandfathers spoke when breechloaders came in, and that delightful pastime with ramrod and wads, powder flask and shot belt went out. So it ever has been! Since the day some horrid fellow used a bronze sword instead of a stone on a stick, and since Richard of the Lion Heart took to that ”infernal instrument,” the cross bow, because of its ”dreadful power,” and so earned from Providence and Pope Innocent II.
”heavenly retribution,” and was shot by one of its bolts.
As I write these somewhat discursive notes, there is a very old-world figure pa.s.sing our verandah every now and then; he is our night watchman, called a Chowkidar or Ramoosee. He is heavily draped with dark cloak of many vague folds, and carries a staff and lantern; he belongs to a caste of robbers, and did he not receive his pittance, he and his friends would loot the place--and possibly get shot trying to do so. He flashes his lantern through your blinds as you try to sleep. Then if he wakens you by his snoring, you steal out and pour water gently down his neck.
A hyaena or jackal has started laughing outside--phew!--what an eerie laugh--mad as can be--what horrid humour! I have mentioned a lady's husband was taken away from her and eaten by a tiger lately, somewhere about this country, so we begin to feel quite _in medias res_, though far from the madding town.
To-morrow we drive to our shoot--start at six! To drive in dumbies, about eight miles. But what does distance matter; it's our first day's shooting in India--duck to-day, black-buck to-morrow, then sambhur, perhaps, and who knows, the royal procession may not account for all the tigers! and I begin to have a feeling that if one came within a fair distance, and did not look very fierce, I'd be inclined to lowse off my great heavy double-barrelled 450 cordite express and see if anything happened.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The above painted by Allan Betty Iris and Uncle Gordon.]
CHAPTER XIV
_Copy letter on subject of ”Duck.”_
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Dear B,--There are still a few minutes before old Sol gets his face under cover, so I am going to let you know of my first great day's Indian s.h.i.+kar! It was A.1. from start to finish, though an old resident here might laugh at its being given such a fine term. I know that it would have been as interesting to you as it was to me; it was so different from anything we have at home.
I met a man at the club who said, ”Won't you come with us to-morrow (Sunday) and have a try for duck?” and I jumped--haven't had anything in way of exercise, bar a little mild riding and tennis for weeks. These fellows are so busy all the week they put in the Sunday out of doors shooting. Don't you wish we could too? You know everyone shoots here, it is free--one of the reasons so many of our best young fellows come out--men who haven't got ancestral or rented acres to shoot over.