Twenty-One Days in India Part 6

[November 8, 1879.]

I missed two people at the Delhi a.s.semblage of 1877. All the gram-fed secretaries and most of the alcoholic chiefs were there; but the famine-haunted villager and the delirium-shattered, opium-eating Chinaman, who had to pay the bill, were not present.

I cannot understand why Viceroys and English newspapers call the Indian cultivator a "riot." He never amounts to a riot if you treat him properly. He may be a disorderly crowd sometimes; but that is only when you embody him in a police force or convert him into cavalry. The atomic disembodied villager has no notion of rioting, _ca-ira_ singing, or any of the tomfooleries of revolution. These pastimes are for men who are both idle and frivolous. When our villager wants to realise a political idea, he dies of famine. This has about it a certain air of seriousness. A man will not die of famine unless he be in earnest.

Lord Bacon's apothegm was that _Eating maketh a full man_; and it would be better to give the starving cultivator Bacon than the report of that Commission (which we cannot name without tears and laughter) which goes to work on the a.s.sumption that _writing maketh a full man_--that to write over a certain area of paper will fill the collapsed cuticles of the agricultural cla.s.s throughout India.

When [Sir Richard Temple] first started the idea of holding famines, I proposed that he should ill.u.s.trate his project by stopping the pay and allowances of the Government of India for a month. But he did not listen to my proposal. People seldom listen to my proposals; and sometimes I think that this accounts for my const.i.tutional melancholy.

You will ask, "What has all this talk of food and famine to do with the villager?" I reply, "Everything." Famine is the horizon of the Indian villager; insufficient food is the foreground. And this is the more extraordinary since the villager is surrounded by a dreamland of plenty. Everywhere you see fields flooded deep with millet and wheat.

The village and its old trees have to climb on to a knoll to keep their feet out of the glorious poppy and the luscious sugar-cane.

Sumptuous cream-coloured bullocks move sleepily about with an air of luxurious sloth; and sleek Brahmans utter their lazy prayers while bathing languidly in the water and suns.h.i.+ne of the tank. Even the buffaloes have nothing to do but float the livelong day deeply immersed in the bulrushes. Everything is steeped in repose. The bees murmur their idylls among the flowers; the doves moan their amorous complaints from the shady leaf.a.ge of pipal trees; out of the cool recesses of wells the idle cooing of the pigeons ascends into the summer-laden air; the rainbow-fed chameleon slumbers on the branch; the enamelled beetle on the leaf; the little fish in the sparkling depths below; the radiant kingfisher, tremulous as sunlight, in mid-air; and the peac.o.c.k, with furled glories, on the temple tower of the silent G.o.ds. Amid this easeful and luscious splendour the villager labours and starves.

Reams of hiccoughing plat.i.tudes lodged in the pigeon-holes of the Home Office by all the gentlemen clerks and gentlemen farmers of the world cannot mend this. While the Indian villager has to maintain the glorious phantasmagoria of an imperial policy, while he has to support legions of scarlet soldiers, golden chupra.s.sies, purple politicals, and green commissions, he must remain the hunger-stricken, overdriven phantom he is.

While the eagle of Thought rides the tempest in scorn, Who cares if the lightning is burning the corn?

If Old England is going to maintain her throne and her swagger in our vast Orient she ought to pay up like a--man, I was going to say; for, according to the old Sanscrit proverb, "You can get nothing for nothing, and deuced little for a halfpenny." These unpaid-for glories bring nothing but shame.

But even the poor Indian cultivator has his joys beneath the clouds of Revenue Boards and Famine Commissions. If we look closely at his life we may see a soft glory resting upon it. I am not Mr. Caird, and I do not intend entering into the technical details of agriculture--"_Quid de utilitate loquar stercorandi?_"--but I would say something of that sweetness which a close communion with earth and heaven must shed upon the silence of lonely labour in the fields. G.o.d is ever with the cultivator in all the manifold sights and sounds of this marvellous world of His. In that mysterious temple of the Dawn, in which we of noisy mess-rooms, heated courts, and dusty offices are infrequent wors.h.i.+ppers, the peasant is a priest. There he offers up his hopes and fears for rain and suns.h.i.+ne; there he listens to the anthems of birds we rarely hear, and interprets auguries that for us have little meaning.

The beast of prey skulking back to his lair, the stag quenching his thirst ere retiring to the depths of the forest, the wedge of wild fowl flying with trumpet notes to some distant lake, the vulture hastening in heavy flight to the carrion that night has provided, the crane flapping to the shallows, and the jackal shuffling along to his shelter in the nullah, have each and all their portent to the initiated eye. Day, with its fierce glories, brings the throbbing silence of intense life, and under flickering shade, amid the soft pulsations of Nature, the cultivator lives his daydream. What there is of squalor, and drudgery, and carking care in his life melts into a brief oblivion, and he is a man in the presence of his G.o.d with the holy stillness of Nature brooding over him. With lengthening shadows comes labour and a re-awaking. The air is once more full of all sweet sounds, from the fine whistle of the kite, sailing with supreme dominion through the azure depths of air, to the stir and buzzing chatter of little birds and crickets among the leaves and gra.s.s. The egret has resumed his fis.h.i.+ng in the tank where the rain is stored for the poppy and sugarcane fields, the sand-pipers bustle along the margin, or wheel in little silvery clouds over the bright waters, the gloomy cormorant sits alert on the stump of a dead date-tree, the little black divers hurry in and out of the weeds, and ever and anon shoot under the water in hot quest of some tiny fish; the whole machinery of life and death is in full play, and our villager shouts to his patient oxen and lives his life. Then gradual darkness, and food with homely joys, a little talk, a little tobacco, a few sad songs, and kindly sleep.

The villages are of immemorial antiquity; their names, their traditions, their hereditary offices have come down out of the dim past through countless generations. History sweeps over them with her trampling armies and her conquerors, her changing dynasties and her s.h.i.+fting laws--sweeps over them and leaves them unchanged.

The village is self-contained. It is a complete organism, protoplastic it may be, with the chlorophyll of age colouring its inst.i.tutions, but none the less a perfect, living ent.i.ty. It has within itself everything that its existence demands, and it has no ambition. The torment of frustrated hope and of supersession is unknown in the village. We who are always striving to roll our prospects and our office boxes up the hill to Simla may learn a lesson here:

Sisyphus in vita quoque n.o.bis ante oculos est Qui petere a populo fasces saevasque secures Imbibit et semper victus tristisque recedit.

Nam petere imperium quod inanest nec datur umquam, Atque in eo semper durum sufferre laborem, Hoc est adverse nixantem trudere monte Saxum quod tamen e summojam vertice rusum Volvitur et plani raptim pet.i.t sequora campi.

In this idyllic existence, in which, as I have said, there is no ambition, several other ills are also wanting. There is, for instance, no News in the village. The village is without the pale of intelligence. This must indeed be bliss. Just fancy, dear Vanity, a state of existence in which there are no politics, no discoveries, no travels, no speculations, no Garnet Wolseleys, no Gladstones, no Captain Careys, no Sarah Bernhardts! If there be a heaven upon earth, it is surely here. Here no Press Commissioner sits on the hillside croaking dreary translations from the St. Petersburg press; here no _Pioneer_ sings catches with Sir John Strachey in Council. But here the lark sings in heaven for evermore, the sweet corn grows below, and the villager, amid these quiet joys with which the earth fills her lap, dreams his low life.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.

No. XV

THE OLD COLONEL

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD COLONEL--"Ripening for pension."]

"Kwaihaipeglaoandjeldikaro"--_Rigmarole Veda._

[November 15, 1879.]

The old Indian Colonel ripening for pension on the shelf of General Duty is an object at once pitiful and ludicrous. His profession has ebbed away from him, and he lies a melancholy derelict on the sh.o.r.e, with sails flapping idly against the mast and meaningless pennants streaming in the wind.

He has forgotten nearly everything he ever learnt of military duty, and what he has not forgotten has been changed. It is as much as he can do to keep up with the most advanced thoughts of the Horse Guards on b.u.t.tons and gold lace. Yet he is still employed sometimes to turn out a guard, or to swear that "the Service is going," &c.; and though he has lost his nerve for riding, he has still a good seat on a boot-lace committee.

He is a very methodical old man. He rises at an early hour, strolls down to the club on the Mall--perhaps the Wheler Club, perhaps some other--has his tea, newspaper, and gossip there, and then back to his small bungalow, [where he turns out his servants for swearing parade.

Each one gets it pretty hot; and then breakfast]. After breakfast he arrays himself for the day in some nondescript white uniform, and with a forage cap stuck gaily on one side of his head, a cheroot in his mouth, and a large white umbrella in his hand, he again sallies forth to the Club. An old horse is led behind him.

Now the serious business of life again begins--to get through the day.

There are six newspapers to read, twelve pegs to drink, four-and-twenty Madras cheroots to smoke, there is kindly tiffin to linger over, forty winks afterwards, a game of billiards, the band on the Mall, dinner, and over all, incessant chatter, chatter, old scandal, old jokes, and old stories. Everyone likes the old Colonel, of course. Everyone says, "Here comes poor old Smith; what an infernal bore he is!" "Hulloa, Colonel, how are you? glad to see you! what's the news? how's exchange?"

The old Colonel is not avaricious, but he saves money. He cannot help it. He has no tastes and he draws very large pay. His mind, therefore, broods over questions relating to the investment of money, the depreciation of silver, and the saving effected by purchasing things at co-operative stores. He never really solves any problem suggested by these topics. His mind is not prehensile like the tail of the Apollo Bundar; everything eludes its grasp, so its pursuits are terminable. The old Colonel's cerebral caloric burns with a feeble flicker, like that of Madras secretariats, and never consumes a subject. The same theme is always fresh fuel. You might say the same thing to him every morning, at the same hour till the crack of doom, and he would never recollect that he had heard your remark before.

This certainly must give a freshness to life and render eternity possible.

The old Colonel is not naturally an indolent man, but the prominent fact about him is that he has nothing to do. If you gave him a sun-dial to take care of, or a rain-gauge to watch, or a secret to keep, he would be quite delighted. I once asked Smith to keep a secret of mine, and the poor old fellow was so much afraid of losing it that in a few hours he had got everybody in the station helping him to keep it. It always surprises me that men with so much time on their hands do not become Political Agents.

Sometimes our old Colonel gets into the flagitious habit of writing for the newspapers. He talks himself into thinking that he possesses a grievance, so he puts together a fasciculus of lop-sided sentences, gets the ideas set straight by the Doctor, the spelling refurbished by the Padre, and fires off the product to the _Delhi Gazette_ or the _Himalayan Chronicle_. Then days of feverish excitement supervene, hope alternating with fear. Will it appear? Will the Commander-in-Chief be offended? Will the Government of India be angry?

What will the Service say?

The old Colonel is always rather suspicious of the great c.o.c.ked-hats at head-quarters. He knows that to maintain an air of activity they must still be changing something or abolis.h.i.+ng something, and he is always afraid that they will change or abolish him. But how could they change the old Colonel? In a regiment he would be like Alice in Wonderland; on the Staff he would be like old wine in a new bottle.

They might make him a K.C.B., it is true; but he does not belong to the Simla Band of Hope, and stars must not be allowed to shoot madly from their sphere. As to abolis.h.i.+ng the old Colonel, this too presents its difficulties, for Sir Norman Henry and all the celebrated c.o.c.ked-hats at home and abroad look upon the Indian Staff Corps as Pygmalion looked on his Venus. They dote on its lifeless charms, and (figuratively) love to clasp it in their foolish arms. [Now the old Colonel is the trunk of this Frankenstein--to change the scene. So we must not abolish the old Colonel.]

It is better to dress him up in an old red coat, and strap him on to an old sword with a bra.s.s scabbard, that he may stand up on high ceremonials and drink the health of the good Queen for whom he has lived bravely through suns.h.i.+ne and stormy weather, in defiance of epidemics, retiring schemes and the Army Medical Department. It is good to ask him to place his old knees under your hospitable board, and to fill him with wholesome wine, while he decants the mellow stories of an Anglo-India that is speedily dissolving from view.

The old Colonel has no harm in him; his scandal blows upon the grandmothers of people that have pa.s.sed away, and his little improprieties are such as might ill.u.s.trate a sermon of the present day. [A rabbit might play with him if there were no chutni lying about.]

But you must never speak to him as if his sun were setting. He is as hopeful as a two-year-old. Every Gazette thrills him with vague expectations and alarms. If he found himself in orders for a Brigade he would be less surprised than anyone in the Army. He never ceases to hope that something may turn up--that something tangible may issue from the circ.u.mambient world of conjecture. But nothing will ever turn up for our poor old Colonel till his poor old toes turn up to the daisies. This change only, which we harshly call "Death," will steal over his prospects; this new slide only will be slipped into the magic lantern of his existence, accompanied by funeral drums and slow marching.

Soon we shall hardly be able to decipher his name and age on the crumbling gravestone among the weeds of our horrible station cemetery--but what matters it?

"For his bones are dust, And his sword is rust, And his soul is with the saints, we trust."

ALI BABA, K.C.B.

No. XVI

THE CIVIL SURGEON

"Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it."