Part 4 (2/2)

The river is getting low, and the water in this arm of it is hardly more than waist-deep anywhere. So it is not at all extraordinary that the boat should be anch.o.r.ed in mid-stream. On the bank, to my right, the ryots are ploughing and cows are now and then brought down to the water's edge for a drink. To the left there are the mango and cocoanut trees of the old Shelidah garden above, and on the bathing slope below there are village women was.h.i.+ng clothes, filling water jars, bathing, laughing and gossiping in their provincial dialect.

The younger girls never seem to get through their sporting in the water; it is a delight to hear their careless, merry laughter. The men gravely take their regulation number of dips and go away, but girls are on much more intimate terms with the water. Both alike babble and chatter and ripple and sparkle in the same simple and natural manner; both may languish and fade away under a scorching glare, yet both can take a blow without hopelessly breaking under it. The hard world, which, but for them, would be barren, cannot fathom the mystery of the soft embrace of their arms.

Tennyson has it that woman to man is as water to wine. I feel to-day it should be as water is to land. Woman is more at home with the water, laving in it, playing with it, holding her gatherings beside it; and while, for her, other burdens are not seemly, the carrying of water from the spring, the well, the bank of river or pool, has ever been held to become her.

BOLPUR,

2_nd May_ 1892.

There are many paradoxes in the world and one of them is this, that wherever the landscape is immense, the sky unlimited, clouds intimately dense, feelings unfathomable--that is to say where infinitude is manifest--its fit companion is one solitary person; a mult.i.tude there seems so petty, so distracting.

An individual and the infinite are on equal terms, worthy to gaze on one another, each from his own throne. But where many men are, how small both humanity and infinitude become, how much they have to knock off each other, in order to fit in together! Each soul wants so much room to expand that in a crowd it needs must wait for gaps through which to thrust a little craning piece of a head from time to time.

So the only result of our endeavour to a.s.semble is that we become unable to fill our joined hands, our outstretched arms, with this endless, fathomless expanse.

BOLPUR,

8_th Jaistha_ (_May_) 1892.

Women who try to be witty, but only succeed in being pert, are insufferable; and as for attempts to be comic they are disgraceful in women whether they succeed or fail. The comic is ungainly and exaggerated, and so is in some sort related to the sublime. The elephant is comic, the camel and the giraffe are comic, all overgrowth is comic.

It is rather keenness that is akin to beauty, as the thorn to the flower.

So sarcasm is not unbecoming in woman, though coming from her it hurts.

But ridicule which savours of bulkiness woman had better leave to our sublime s.e.x. The masculine Falstaff makes our sides split, but a feminine Falstaff would only rack our nerves.

BOLPUR,

12_th Jaistha_ (_May_) 1892.

I usually pace the roof-terrace, alone, of an evening. Yesterday afternoon I felt it my duty to show my visitors the beauties of the local scenery, so I strolled out with them, taking Agh.o.r.e as a guide.

On the verge of the horizon, where the distant fringe of trees was blue, a thin line of dark blue cloud had risen over them and was looking particularly beautiful. I tried to be poetical and said it was like blue collyrium on the fringe of lashes enhancing a beautiful blue eye. Of my companions one did not hear the remark, another did not understand, while the third dismissed it with the reply: ”Yes, very pretty.” I did not feel encouraged to attempt a second poetical flight.

After walking about a mile we came to a dam, and along the pool of water there was a row of _tal_ (fan palm) trees, under which was a natural spring. While we stood there looking at this, we found that the line of cloud which we had seen in the North was making for us, swollen and grown darker, flashes of lightning gleaming the while.

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