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Title: Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.; and, the Teapot Series

Author: George Aberigh-Mackay

Release date: July 31, 2004 [eBook #13068]
                Most recently updated: December 15, 2020

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Keith M. Eckrich and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWENTY-ONE DAYS IN INDIA, OR, THE TOUR OF SIR ALI BABA K.C.B.; AND, THE TEAPOT SERIES ***


E-text prepared by Keith M. Eckrich and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team



TWENTY-ONE DAYS IN INDIA

Or, The Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.

and THE TEAPOT SERIES

by

GEORGE R. ABERIGH-MACKAY
Sometime Principal of the Rajkumar College Indore

Ninth Edition with New Illustrations and Elucidations

1914







[Illustration: THE TRAVELLING M.P.--"The British Lion rampant."]




PUBLISHERS' PREFACE


In this edition it has been considered advisable to reproduce,
verbatim, only the "Twenty-one Days" as originally published in
_Vanity Fair_, the additional series of six included in several
editions of the book issued after the Author's death being omitted.

The twenty-one papers in question have been supplemented by
contributions to _The Bombay Gazette_, which appeared in that daily
newspaper during the whole of the year 1880, the year before the
Author's death, under the _nom de plume_ of "Our Political Orphan;"
and the Publishers beg to tender their best thanks to the proprietors
of that newspaper for the permission thus generously accorded for
their present reproduction.

In carrying out the work of revision many passages previously omitted
have been restored to the text. To render such readily apparent to the
reader, they have in every case been enclosed in [] brackets.

A new series of illustrations has been specially prepared for this
edition by Mr. George Darby of Calcutta, and the Publishers venture to
think he has succeeded in a marked degree in embodying in his sketches
the spirit of the Author's subjects.

In conclusion it has been the aim of the Publishers to render this new
edition of a great work by a very gifted writer as perfect as possible
and worthy of acceptance as a standard Anglo-Indian classic.

LONDON

September, 1910.




CONTENTS


    PREFACE

    I.  WITH THE VICEROY

   II.  THE A.-D.-C.-IN-WAITING, AN ARRANGEMENT IN SCARLET AND GOLD

  III.  WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

   IV.  WITH THE ARCHDEACON, A MAN OF BOTH WORLDS

    V.  WITH THE SECRETARY TO GOVERNMENT

   VI.  H.E. THE BENGALI BABOO

  VII.  WITH THE RAJA

 VIII.  WITH THE POLITICAL AGENT, A MAN IN BUCKRAM

   IX.  WITH THE COLLECTOR

    X.  BABY IN PARTIBUS

   XI.  THE RED CHUPRASSIE; OR, THE CORRUPT LICTOR

  XII.  THE PLANTER; A FARMER PRINCE

 XIII.  THE EURASIAN; A STUDY IN CHIARO-OSCURO

  XIV.  THE VILLAGER

   XV.  THE OLD COLONEL

  XVI.  THE CIVIL SURGEON

 XVII.  THE SHIKARRY

XVIII.  THE GRASS-WIDOW IN NEPHELOCOCCYGIA

  XIX.  THE TRAVELLING M.P., THE BRITISH LION RAMPANT

   XX.  MEM-SAHIB

  XXI.  ALI BABA ALONE; THE LAST DAY

       *       *       *        *       *

EXTRACTS FROM "SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS"

BY "OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN"

_Bombay Gazette Press_, 1881.




THE TEAPOT SERIES:

      SOCIAL DISSECTION

      SAHIB

      THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS

      THE ORPHAN'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS

      SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA

       *       *       *       *       *

ELUCIDATIONS


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

      THE TRAVELLING M.P.

      THE A.D.C. IN WAITING

      THE ARCHDEACON

      THE BENGALI BABOO

      THE POLITICAL AGENT

      THE RED CHUPRASSIE

      THE PLANTER

      THE EURASIAN

      THE OLD COLONEL

      THE GRASS-WIDOW




No. I



WITH THE VICEROY


[August 2, 1879.]

It is certainly a little intoxicating to spend a day with the Great
Ornamental. You do not see much of him perhaps; but he is a Presence
to be felt, something floating loosely about in wide epicene
pantaloons and flying skirts, diffusing as he passes the fragrance of
smile and pleasantry and cigarette. The air around him is laden with
honeyed murmurs; gracious whispers play about the twitching bewitching
corners of his delicious mouth. He calls everything by "soft names in
many a mused rhyme." Deficits, Public Works, and Cotton Duties are
transmuted by the alchemy of his gaiety into sunshine and songs. An
office-box on his writing-table an office-box is to him, and it is
something more: it holds cigarettes. No one knows what sweet thoughts
are his as Chloe flutters through the room, blushful and startled, or
as a fresh beaker full of the warm South glows between his amorous eye
and the sun.

      "I have never known
      Praise of love or wine
      That panted forth a flood of twaddle so divine."

I never tire of looking at a Viceroy. He is a being so heterogeneous
from us! He is the centre of a world with which he has no affinity. He
is a veiled prophet. [He wears many veils indeed.] He who is the axis
of India, the centre round which the Empire rotates, is absolutely and
necessarily withdrawn from all knowledge of India. He lisps no
syllable of any Indian tongue; no race or caste, or mode of Indian
life is known to him; all our delightful provinces of the sun that lie
off the railway are to him an undiscovered country; Ghebers, Moslems,
Hindoos blend together in one indistinguishable dark mass before his
eye, [in which the cataract of English indifference has not been
couched; most delightful of all--he knows not the traditions of
Anglo-India, and he does not belong to the Bandicoot Club, St. James's
Square!]

A Nawab, whom the Foreign Office once farmed out to me, often used to
ask what the use of a Viceroy was. I do not believe that he meant to
be profane. The question would again and again recur to his mind, and
find itself on his lips. I always replied with the counter question,
"What is the use of India?" He never would see--the Oriental mind does
not see these things--that the chief end and object of India was the
Viceroy; that, in fact, India was the plant and the Viceroy the
flower.

I have often thought of writing a hymn on the Beauty of Viceroys; and
have repeatedly attuned my mind to the subject; but my inability to
express myself in figurative language, and my total ignorance of
everything pertaining to metre, rhythm, and rhyme, make me rather
hesitate to employ verse. Certainly, the subject is inviting, and I am
surprised that no singer has arisen. How can any one view the
Viceroyal halo of scarlet domestics, with all the bravery of coronets,
supporters, and shields in golden embroidery and lace, without
emotion! How can the tons of gold and silver plate that once belonged
to John Company, Bahadur, and that now repose on the groaning board of
the Great Ornamental, amid a glory of Himalayan flowers, or blossoms
from Eden's fields of asphodel, be reflected upon the eye's retina
without producing positive thrills and vibrations of joy (that cannot
be measured in terms of _ohm_ or _farad_) shooting up and down the
spinal cord and into the most hidden seats of pleasure! I certainly
can never see the luxurious bloom of the silver sticks arranged in
careless groups about the vast portals without a feeling approaching
to awe and worship, and a tendency to fling small coin about with a
fine mediæval profusion. I certainly can never drain those profound
golden cauldrons seething with champagne without a tendency to break
into loud expressions of the inward music and conviviality that simmer
in my soul. Salutes of cannon, galloping escorts, processions of
landaus, beautiful teams of English horses, trains of private saloon
carriages (cooled with water trickling over sweet jungle grasses)
streaming through the sunny land, expectant crowds of beauty with
hungry eyes making a delirious welcome at every stage, the whole
country blooming into dance and banquet and fresh girls at every step
taken--these form the fair guerdon that stirs my breast at certain
moments and makes me often resolve, after dinner, "to scorn delights
and live laborious days," and sell my beautiful soul, illuminated with
art and poetry, to the devil of Industry, with reversion to Sir John
Strachey.

How mysterious and delicious are the cool penetralia of the Viceregal
Office! It is the censorium of the Empire; it is the seat of thought;
it is the abode of moral responsibility! What battles, what famines,
what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts
of change have sprung into life here! Every pigeon-hole contains a
potential revolution; every office-box cradles the embryo of a war or
dearth. What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this
little thunder-cloud office transmit to far-away provinces lying
beyond rising and setting suns! Ah! Vanity, these are pleasant
lodgings for five years, let who may turn the kaleidoscope after us.

A little errant knight of the press who has just arrived on the
Delectable Mountains, comes rushing in, looks over my shoulder, and
says, "A deuced expensive thing a Viceroy." This little errant knight
would take the thunder at a quarter of the price, and keep the Empire
paralytic with change and fear of change as if the great
Thirty-thousand-pounder himself were on Olympus.--ALI BABA.




No. II



THE A.D.C.-IN-WAITING


AN ARRANGEMENT IN SCARLET AND GOLD



[Illustration: THE A.D.C.-IN WAITING--"An arrangement in scarlet and
gold."]



[August 9, 1879.]

The tone of the A.D.C. is subdued. He stands in doorways and strokes
his moustache. He nods sadly to you as you pass. He is preoccupied
with--himself, [some suppose; others aver his office.] He has a
motherly whisper for Secretaries and Members of Council. His way with
ladies is sisterly--undemonstratively affectionate. He tows up rajas
to H.E., and stands in the offing. His attitude towards rajas is one
of melancholy reserve. He will perform the prescribed observances, if
he cannot approve of them. Indeed, generally, he disapproves of the
Indian people, though he condones their existence. For a brother in
aiguillettes there is a Masonic smile and a half-embarrassed
familiarity, as if found out in acting his part. But confidence is
soon restored with melancholy glances around, and profane persons who
may be standing about move uneasily away.

An A.D.C. should have no tastes. He is merged in "the house." He must
dance and ride admirably; he ought to shoot; he may sing and paint in
water-colours, or botanise a little, and the faintest aroma of the
most volatile literature will do him no harm; but he cannot be allowed
preferences. If he has a weakness for very pronounced collars and
shirt-cuffs in mufti, it may be connived at, provided he be honestly
nothing else but the man in collars and cuffs.

When a loud, joyful, and steeplechasing Lord, in the pursuit of
pleasure and distant wars, dons the golden cords for a season, the
world understands that this is masquerading, skittles, and a joke. One
must not confound the ideal A.D.C. with such a figure.

The A.D.C. has four distinct aspects or phases--(1) the full summer
sunshine and bloom of scarlet and gold for Queen's birthdays and high
ceremonials; (2) the dark frock-coats and belts in which to canter
behind his Lord in; (3) the evening tail-coat, turned down with light
blue and adorned with the Imperial arms on gold buttons; (4) and,
finally, the quiet disguises of private life.

It is in the sunshine glare of scarlet and gold that the A.D.C. is
most awful and unapproachable; it is in this aspect that the splendour
of vice-Imperialism seems to beat upon him most fiercely. The Rajas of
Rajputana, the diamonds of Golconda, the gold of the Wynaad, the opium
of Malwa, the cotton of the Berars, and the Stars of India seem to be
typified in the richness of his attire and the conscious superiority
of his demeanour. Is he not one of the four satellites of that Jupiter
who swims in the highest azure fields of the highest heavens?

Frock-coated and belted, he passes into church or elsewhere behind his
Lord, like an aërolite from some distant universe, trailing cloudy
visions of that young lady's Paradise of bright lights and music,
champagne, mayonnaise, and "just-one-more-turn," which is situated
behind the flagstaff on the hill.

The tail-coat, with gold buttons, velvet cuffs, and light blue silk
lining, is quite a demi-official, small-and-early arrangement. It is
compatible with a patronising and somewhat superb flirtation in the
verandah; nay, even under the pine-tree beyond the _Gurkha_ sentinel,
whence many-twinkling Jakko may be admired, it is compatible with a
certain shadow of human sympathy and weakness. An A.D.C. in tail-coat
and gold buttons is no longer a star; he is only a fire-balloon;
though he may twinkle in heaven, he can descend to earth. But in the
quiet disguises of private life he is the mere stick of a rocket. He
is quite of the earth. This scheme of clothing is compatible with the
tenderest offices of gaming or love--offices of which there shall be
no recollection on the re-assumption of uniform and on re-apotheosis.
An A.D.C. in plain clothes has been known to lay the long odds at
whist, and to qualify, very nearly, for a co-respondentship.

In addition to furnishing rooms in his own person, an A.D.C. is
sometimes required to copy my Lord's letters on mail-day, and, in due
subordination to the Military Secretary, to superintend the stables,
kitchen, or Invitation Department.

After performing these high functions, it is hard if an A.D.C. should
ever have to revert to the buffooneries of the parade-ground or the
vulgar intimacies of a mess. It is hard that one who has for five
years been identified with the Empire should ever again come to be
regarded as "Jones of the 10th," and spoken of as "Punch" or "Bobby"
by old boon companions. How can a man who has been behind the curtain,
and who has seen _la première danseuse_ of the Empire practising her
steps before the manager Strachey, in familiar chaff and talk with the
Council ballet, while the little scene-painter and Press Commissioner
stood aside with cocked ears, and the privileged violoncellist made
his careless jests--how, I say, can one who has thus been above the
clouds on Olympus ever associate with the gaping, chattering,
irresponsible herd below?

It is well that our Ganymede should pass away from heaven into
temporary eclipse; it is well that before being exposed to the rude
gaze of the world he should moult his rainbow plumage in the Cimmeria
of the Rajas. Here we shall see him again, a blinking _ignis fatuus_
in a dark land--"so shines a good deed in a naughty world" thinks the
Foreign Office.--ALI BABA.




No. III



WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF



[August 16, 1879.]

At Simla and Calcutta the Government of India always sleeps with a
revolver under its pillow--that revolver is the Commander-in-Chief.
There is a tacit understanding that this revolver is not to be let
off; indeed, sometimes it is believed that this revolver is not
loaded.

[The Commander-in-Chief has a seat in Council; but the Military Member
has a voice. This division of property is seen everywhere. The
Commander-in-Chief has many offices; in each there is someone other
than the Commander-in-Chief who discharges all its duties.

What does the Commander-in-Chief command? Armies? No. In India
Commanders-in-Chief command no armies. The Commander-in-Chief only
commands respect.]

The Commander-in-Chief is himself an army. His transport, medical
attendance, and provisioning are cared for departmentally, and watched
over by responsible officers. He is a host in himself; and a corps of
observation.

All the world observes him. His slightest movement creates a molecular
disturbance in type, and vibrates into newspaper paragraphs.

When Commanders-in-Chief are born the world is unconscious of any
change. No one knows when a Commander-in-Chief is born. No joyful
father, no pale mother has ever experienced such an event as the
birth of a Commander-in-Chief in the family. No Mrs. Gamp has ever
leant over the banister and declared to the expectant father below
that it was "a fine healthy Commander-in-Chief." Therefore, a
Commander-in-Chief is not like a poet. But when a Commander-in-Chief
dies, the spirit of a thousand Beethovens sob and wail in the air;
dull cannon roar slowly out their heavy grief; silly rifles gibber and
chatter demoniacally over his grave; and a cocked hat, emptier than
ever, rides with the mockery of despair on his coffin.

On Sunday evening, after tea and catechism, the Supreme Council
generally meet for riddles and forfeits in the snug little cloak-room
parlour at Peterhoff. "Can an army tailor make a Commander-in-Chief?"
was once asked. Eight old heads were scratched and searched, but no
answer was found. No sound was heard save the seething whisper of
champagne ebbing and flowing in the eight old heads. Outside, the wind
moaned through the rhododendron trees; within, the Commander-in-Chief
wept peacefully. He felt the awkwardness of the situation. [He thought
of Ali Musjid, and he thought of Isandula; he saw himself reflected in
the mirror, and he declared that he gave it up.] An aide-de-camp stood
at the door hiccupping idly. He was known to have invested all his
paper currency in Sackville Street; and he felt in honour bound to say
that the riddle was a little hard on the army tailors. So the subject
dropped.

A Commander-in-Chief is the most beautiful article of social
upholstery in India. He sits in a large chair in the drawing-room.
Heads and bodies sway vertically in passing him. He takes the oldest
woman in to dinner; he gratifies her with his drowsy cackle. He says
"Yes" and "No" to everyone with drowsy civility; everyone is
conciliated. His stars dimly twinkle--twinkle; the host and hostess
enjoy their light. After dinner he decants claret into his venerable
person, and tells an old story; the company smile with innocent joy.
He rejoins the ladies and leers kindly on a pretty woman; she forgives
herself a month of indiscretions. He touches Lieutenant the Hon.
Jupiter Smith on the elbow and inquires after his mother; a noble
family is gladdened. He is thus a source of harmless happiness to
himself and to those around him.

If a round of ball cartridge has been wasted by a suicide, or a pair
of ammunition boots carried off by a deserter, the Commander-in-Chief
sometimes visits a great cantonment under a salute of seventeen guns.
The military then express their joy in their peculiar fashion,
according to their station in life. The cavalry soldier takes out his
charger and gallops heedlessly up and down all the roads in the
station. The sergeants of all arms fume about as if transacting some
important business between the barracks and their officers' quarters.
Subalterns hang about the Mess, whacking their legs with small pieces
of cane and drinking pegs with mournful indifference. The Colonel
sends for everyone who has not the privilege of sending for him,
and says nothing to each one, sternly and decisively. The Majors
and the officers doing general duty go to the Club and swear before
the civilians that they are worked off their legs, complaining
fiercely to themselves that the Service is going, &c. &c. The
Deputy-Assistant-Quartermaster-General puts on all the gold lace he is
allowed to wear, and gallops to the Assistant-Adjutant-General--where
he has tiffin. The Major-General-Commanding writes notes to all his
friends, and keeps orderlies flying at random in every direction.

The Commander-in-Chief--who had a disturbed night in the train--sleeps
peacefully throughout the day, and leaves under another salute in the
afternoon. He shakes hands with everyone he can see at the station,
and jumps into a long saloon carriage, followed by his staff.

"A deuced active old fellow!" everyone says; and they go home and dine
solemnly with one another under circumstances of extraordinary
importance.

The effect of the Commander-in-Chief is very remarkable on the poor
Indian, whose untutored mind sees a Lord in everything. He calls the
Commander-in-Chief "the Jungy Lord," or War-Lord, in contradistinction
to the "Mulky-Lord," or Country-Lord, the appellation of the Viceroy.
To the poor Indian this War-Lord is an object of profound interest and
speculation. He has many aspects that resemble the other and more
intelligible Lord. An aide-de-camp rides behind him; hats, or hands,
rise electrically as he passes; yet it is felt in secret that he is
not pregnant with such thunder-clouds of rupees, and that he cannot
make or mar a Raja. To the Raja it is an ever-recurring question
whether it is necessary or expedient to salaam to the Jungy Lord and
call upon him. He is hedged about with servants who will require to be
richly propitiated before any dusky countryman [of theirs, great or
small,] gets access to this Lord of theirs. Is it, then, worth while
to pass through this fire to the possible Moloch who sits beyond? Will
this process of parting with coin--this Valley of the Shadow of
Death--lead them to any palpable advantage? Perhaps the War-Lord with
his red right hand can add guns to their salute; perhaps he will speak
a recommendatory word to his caste-fellow, the Country-Lord? These are
precious possibilities.

A Raja whom I am now prospecting for the Foreign Office asked me the
other day where Commanders-in-Chief were ripened, seeing that they
were always so mellow and blooming. I mentioned a few nursery gardens
I knew of in and about Whitehall and Pall Mall. H.H. at once said that
he would like to plant his son there, if I would water him with
introductions. This is young 'Arry Bobbery, already favourably known
on the Indian Turf as an enterprising and successful defaulter.

You will know 'Arry Bobbery, if you meet him, dear Vanity, by the
peculiarly gracious way in which he forgives and forgets should you
commit the indiscretion of lending him money. You may be sure that he
will never allude to the matter again, but will rather wear a piquant
do-it-again manner, like our irresistible little friend, Conny B----.
I don't believe, however, that Bobbery will ever become a
Commander-in-Chief, though his distant cousin, Scindia, is a General,
and though they talk of pawning the 'long-shore Governorship of Bombay
to Sir Cursinjee Damtheboy.--ALI BABA.




No. IV



WITH THE ARCHDEACON



A MAN OF BOTH WORLDS



[Illustration: THE ARCHDEACON--"A man of both worlds."]



[August 23, 1879.]

The Press Commissioner has been trying by a strained exercise of his
prerogative to make me spend this day with the Bishop, and not with
the Archdeacon; but I disregard the Press Commissioner; I make light
of him; I treat his authority as a joke. What authority has a pump? Is
a pump an analyst and a coroner?

Why should I spend a day with the Bishop? What claim has the Bishop on
my improving conversation? I am not his sponsor. Besides, he might do
me harm--I am not quite sure of his claret. I admit his superior
ecclesiastical birth; I recollect his connection with St. Peter; and I
am conscious of the more potent spells and effluences of his
shovel-hat and apron; but I find the atmosphere of his heights cold,
and the rarefied air he breathes does not feed my lungs. Up yonder,
above the clouds of human weakness, my vertebræ become unhinged, my
bones inarticulate, and I collapse. I meet missionaries, and I hear
the music of the spheres; and I long to descend again to the circles
of the everyday inferno where my friends are.

      "These distant stars I can forego;
      This kind, warm earth, is all I know."

I am sorry for it. I really have upward tendencies; but I have never
been able to fix upon a balloon. The High Church balloon always seems
to me too light; and the Low Church balloon too heavy; while no
experienced aeronaut can tell me where the Broad Church balloon is
bound for; thus, though a feather-weight sinner, here I am upon the
firm earth. So come along, my dear Archdeacon, let us have a stroll
down the Mall, and a chat about Temporalities, Fabrics, "Mean Whites,"
and little Mrs. Lollipop, "the joy of wild asses."

An Archdeacon is one of the busiest men in India--especially when he
is up on the hill among the sweet pine-trees. He is the recognised
guardian of public morality, and the hill captains and the
semi-detached wives lead him a rare life. There is no junketing at
Goldstein's, no picnic at the waterfalls, no games at Annandale, no
rehearsals at Herr Felix von Battin's, no choir practice at the church
even, from which he can safely absent himself. A word, a kiss, some
matrimonial charm dissolved--these electric disturbances of society
must be averted. The Archdeacon is the lightning conductor; where he
is, the leaven of naughtiness passes to the ground, and society is not
shocked.

In the Bishop and the ordinary padre we have far-away people of
another world. They know little of us; we know nothing of them. We
feel much constraint in their presence. The presence of the
ecclesiastical sex imposes severe restrictions upon our conversation.
The Lieutenant-Governor of the South-Eastern Provinces once complained
to me that the presence of a clergyman rendered nine-tenths of his
vocabulary contraband, and choked up his fountains of anecdote. It
also restricts us in the selection of our friends. But with an
Archdeacon all this is changed. He is both of Heaven and Earth. When
we see him in the pulpit we are pleased to think that we are with the
angels; when we meet him in a ball-room we are flattered to feel that
the angels are with us. When he is with us--though, of course, he is
not of us--he is yet exceedingly like us. He may seem a little more
venerable than he is; perhaps there may be about him a grandfatherly
air that his years do not warrant; he may exact a "Sir" from us that
is not given to others of his worldly standing; but there is
nevertheless that in his bright and kindly eye--there is that in his
side-long glance--which by a charm of Nature transmutes homage into
familiar friendship, and respect into affection.

The character of Archdeacons as clergymen I would not venture to touch
upon. It is proverbial that Archidiaconal functions are Eleusinian in
their mysteriousness. No one, except an Archdeacon, pretends to know
what the duties of an Archdeacon are, so no one can say whether these
duties are performed perfunctorily and inadequately, or scrupulously
and successfully. We know that Archdeacons sometimes preach, and that
is about all we know. I know an Archdeacon in India who can preach a
good sermon--I have heard him preach it many a time, once on a benefit
night for the Additional Clergy Society. It wrung four annas from
me--but it was a terrible wrench. I would not go through it again to
have every living graduate of St. Bees and Durham disgorged on our
coral strand.

From my saying this do not suppose that I am Mr. Whitley Stokes, or
Babu Keshub Chundra Sen. I am a Churchman, beneath the surface, though
a pellicle of inquiry may have supervened. I am not with the party of
the Bishop, nor yet am I with Sir J.S., or Sir A.C. I abide in the
Limbo of Vanity, as a temporary arrangement, to study the seamy side
of Indian politics and morality, to examine misbegotten wars and
reforms with the scalpel, Stars of India with the spectroscope, and to
enjoy the society of half-a-dozen amusing people to whom the Empire of
India is but a wheel of fortune.

I like the recognised relations between the Archdeacon and women. They
are more than avuncular and less than cousinly; they are tender
without being romantic, and confiding without being burdensome. He has
the private _entrée_ at _chhoti hazri_, or early breakfast; he sees
loose and flowing robes that are only for esoteric disciples; he has
the private _entrée_ at five o'clock tea and hears plans for the
evening campaign openly discussed. He is quite behind the scenes. He
hears the earliest whispers of engagements and flirtations. He can
give a stone to the Press Commissioner in the gossip handicap, and win
in a canter. You cannot tell him anything he does not know already.

Whenever the Government of India has a merrymaking, he is out on the
trail. At Delhi he was in the thick of the mummery, beaming on
barbaric princes and paynim princesses, blessing banners, blessing
trumpeters, blessing proclamations, blessing champagne and truffles,
blessing pretty girls, and blessing the conjunction of planets that
had placed his lines in such pleasant places. His tight little cob,
his perfect riding kit, his flowing beard, and his pleasant smile were
the admiration of all the Begums and Nabobs that had come to the fair.
The Government of India took such delight in him that they gave him a
gold medal and a book.

With the inferior clergy the Archdeacon is not at his ease. He cannot
respect the little ginger-bread gods of doctrine they make for
themselves; he cannot worship at their hill altars; their hocus-pocus
and their crystallised phraseology fall dissonantly on his ear; their
talk of chasubles and stoles, eastern attitude, and all the rest of
it, is to him as a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. He would
like to see the clergy merely scholars and men of sense set apart for
the conduct of divine worship and the encouragement of all good and
kindly offices to their neighbours; he does not wish to see them
mediums and conjurors. He thinks that in a heathen country their
paltry fetishism of misbegotten notions and incomprehensible phrases
is peculiarly offensive and injurious to the interests of civilisation
and Christianity. Of course the Archdeacon may be very much mistaken
in all this; and it is this generous consciousness of fallibility
which gives the singular charm to his religious attitude. He can take
off his ecclesiastical spectacles and perceive that he may be in the
wrong like other men.

Let us take a last look at the Archdeacon, for in the whole range of
prominent Anglo-Indian characters our eye will not rest upon a more
orbicular and satisfactory figure.

      A good Archdeacon, nobly planned
      To warn, to comfort, and command;
      And yet a spirit gay and bright,
      With something of the candle-light.

                                         ALI BABA.




No. V



WITH THE SECRETARY TO GOVERNMENT



[August 30, 1879.]

He is clever, I am told, and being clever he has to be rather morose
in manner and careless in dress, or people might forget that he was
clever. He has always been clever. He was the clever man of his year.
He was so clever when he first came out that he could never learn to
ride, or speak the language, and had to be translated to the
Provincial Secretariat. But though he could never speak an
intelligible sentence in the language, he had such a practical and
useful knowledge of it, in half-a-dozen of its dialects, that he could
pass examinations in it with the highest credit, netting immense
rewards. He thus became not only more and more clever, but more and
more solvent; until he was an object of wonder to his contemporaries,
of admiration to the Lieutenant-Governor, and of desire to several
_Burra Mem Sahibs_[A] with daughters. It was about this time that he
is supposed to have written an article published in some English
periodical. It was said to be an article of a solemn description, and
report magnified the periodical into the _Quarterly Review_. So he
became one who wrote for the English Press. It was felt that he was a
man of letters; it was assumed that he was on terms of familiar
correspondence with all the chief literary men of the day. With so
conspicuous a reputation, he believed it necessary to do something in
religion. So he gave up religion, and allowed it to be understood that
he was a man of advanced views: a Positivist, a Buddhist, or something
equally occult. Thus he became ripe for the highest employment, and
was placed successively on a number of Special Commissions. He
inquired into everything; he wrote hundredweights of reports; he
proved himself to have the true paralytic ink flux, precisely the kind
of wordy discharge or brain hæmorrhage required of a high official in
India. He would write ten pages where a clod-hopping collector would
write a sentence. He could say the same thing over and over again in a
hundred different ways. The feeble forms of official satire were at
his command. [He could bray ironically at subordinate officers. He had
the inborn arrogance required for official "snubbing." Being without a
ray of good feeling or modesty, he could allow himself to write with
ceremonial rudeness of men who in his inmost heart he knew to be in
every way his superiors.] He desired exceedingly to be thought
supercilious, and he thus became almost necessary to the Government of
India, was canonised, and caught up to Simla. The Indian papers
chanted little anthems, "the Services" said "Amen," and the apotheosis
was felt to be a success. On reaching Simla he was found to be
familiar with the two local "jokes," planted many years ago by some
jackass. One of these "jokes" is about everything in India having its
peculiar smell, except a flower; the second is some inanity about the
Indian Government being a despotism of despatch-boxes tempered by the
loss of the keys. He often emitted these mournful "jokes" until he was
declared to be an acquisition to Simla society.

Such is the man I am with to-day. His house is beautifully situated,
overlooking a deep ravine, full of noble pine-trees, and surrounded by
rhododendrons. The verandah is gay with geraniums and tall servants in
Imperial red deeply encrusted with gold. Within, all is very
respectable and nice, only the man is--not exactly vile, but certainly
imperfect in a somewhat conspicuous degree. With the more attractive
forms of sin he has no true sympathy. I can strike no concord with him
on this umbrageous side of nature. I am seriously shocked to discover
this, for he affects infirmity; but his humanity is weak. In his
character I perceive the perfect animal outline, but the colour is
wanting; the glorious sunshine, the profound glooms of humanity are
not there.

Such a man is dangerous; he decoys you into confidences. Even Satan
cannot respect a sinner of this complexion,--a sinner who is only
fascinated by the sinfulness of sin. As for my poor host, I can see
that he has never really graduated in sin at all; he has only sought
the degree of sinner _honoris causa_. I am sure that he never had
enough true vitality or enterprise to sin as a man ought to sin, if he
does sin. [Of course a man ought not to sin; and the nobler sort try
to reduce their sinning to a minimum; but when they do sin I hold that
they sin like men. (I have heard it said that a man should sin like a
gentleman; but I am much disposed to think that the gentleman nature
appears in the non-sinning lucid intervals.)] When I speak of sin I
will be understood to mean the venial offences of prevarication and
sleeping in church. I am not thinking of sheep-stealing or highway
robbery. My clever friend's work consists chiefly in reducing files of
correspondence on a particular subject to one or two leading thoughts.
Upon these he casts the colour of his own opinions, and submits the
subjective product to the Secretary or Member of Council above him for
final orders. His mind is one of the many dense and refractive mediums
through which the Government of India looks out upon India.

From time to time he is called upon to write a minute or a note on
some given subject, and then it is that his thoughts and words expand
freely. He feels bound to cover an area of paper proportionate to his
own opinion, of his own importance; he feels bound to introduce a
certain seasoning of foreign words and phrases; and he feels bound to
create, if the occasion seems in any degree to warrant it, one of
those cock-eyed, limping, stammering epigrams which belong exclusively
to the official humour of Simla. [In writing thus, the figure of
another Secretariat official rises before me with reproachful looks. I
see the thought-worn face of that Secretary to whom the Rajas belong,
and who is, in every particular, a striking contrast with the typical
person whose portrait I sketch. The Secretary in the Foreign
Department is a scholar and a man of letters by instinct. Whatever he
writes is something more than correct and precise--it is impressed
with the sweep and cadence of the sea; it is rhythmical, it is
sonorous.]

[But let us return to the prisoner in the dock] I have said that the
Secretary is clever, scornful, jocose, imperfectly sinful, and nimble
with his pen. I shall only add that he has succeeded in catching the
tone of the Imperial Bumbledom; and then I shall have finished my
defence.

This tone is an affectation of æsthetic and literary sympathies,
combined with a proud disdain of everything Indian and Anglo-Indian.

The flotsam and jetsam of advanced European thought are eagerly sought
and treasured up. "The New Republic" and "The Epic of Hades" are on
every drawing-room table. One must speak of nothing but the latest
doings at the Gaiety, the pictures of the last Academy, the ripest
outcome of scepticism in the _Nineteenth Century_, or the aftermath in
the _Fortnightly_. If I were to talk to our Secretariat man about the
harvest prospects of the Deckan, the beauty of the Himalayan scenery,
or the book I have just published in Calcutta about the Rent Law, he
would stare at me with feigned surprise and horror.

      "When he thinks of his own native land,
        In a moment he seems to be there;
      But, alas! Ali Baba at hand
        Soon hurries him back to despair."

                                             ALI BABA.




No. VI



H.E. THE BENGALI BABOO


[Illustration: THE BENGALI BABOO--"Full of inappropriate words and
phrases."]



[September 13, 1879.]

The ascidian[B] that got itself evolved into Bengali Baboos must have
seized the first moment of consciousness and thought to regret the
step it had taken; for however much we may desire to diffuse Babooism
over the Empire, we must all agree that the Baboo itself is a subject
for tears.

The other day, as I was strolling down the Mall, whistling Beethoven's
9th Symphony, I met the Bengali Baboo. It was returning from office. I
asked it if it had a soul. It replied that it had not, but some day it
hoped to pass the matriculation examination of the Calcutta
University. I whistled the opening bars of one of Cherubini's
Requiems, but I saw no resurrection in its eye, so I passed on.

[I have just procured an adult specimen of the Bengali Baboo (it was
originally the editor of the _Calcutta Moonshine_), and I have engaged
an embryologist, on board wages, to examine and report upon it.

I once found George Bassoon weeping profusely over a dish of
artichokes. I was a little surprised, for there was a bottle close at
hand and he had a book in his hand. I took the book. It was not
Boccaccio; it was not Rabelais; it was not even Swinburne. I felt that
something must be wrong. I turned to the title-page. I found it was a
poem printed for private circulation by the _Government of India_. It
was called "The Anthropomorphous Baboo subtilised into Man."]

When I was at Lhassa the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous
cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might, under unfavourable
circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and
that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was
a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile
tail which the Education Department finds so much in the way of
improvement, which indeed is said to preclude all access to the
Bengali mind, and which can grasp everything but an idea, even an
inquisitorial schoolmaster? "Hereby hangs a tail" is a motto in which
Edward Gibbon had no monopoly.]

I forget whether it was the Duke of Buckingham, or Mr. Lethbridge, or
General Scindia--I always mix up these C.I.E.'s together in my mind
somehow--who told me that a Bengali Baboo had never been known to
laugh, but only to giggle with clicking noises like a crocodile. Now
this is very telling evidence, because if a Baboo does not laugh at a
C.I.E. he will laugh at nothing. The faculty must be wanting.

[The Raja of Fattehpur, Member of the Legislative Council, and
commonly known as "Joe Hookham," says that fossil Baboos have been
found in Orissa with the cuckoo-bone, everything that a schoolmaster
could wish. Now "Joe" is a palæontologist not to be sneezed at. This
confirms the opinion of General Cunningham that the mounted figure in
the neighbourhood of Lahore represents a Bengali washerwoman riding to
the _Ghât_ to perform a lustration. Because unless the _os coccyx_
were all right it would be as difficult to ride a bullock as to get
educated by the usual process.]

When Lord Macaulay said that what the milk was to the cocoanut, what
beauty was to the buffalo, and what scandal was to woman, that Dr.
Johnson's Dictionary was to the Bengali Baboo, he unquestionably spoke
in terms of figurative exaggeration; nevertheless, a core of truth
lies hidden in his remark. It is by the Baboo's words you know the
Baboo. The true Baboo is full of words and phrases--full of
inappropriate words and phrases lying about like dead men on a
battlefield, in heaps to be carted away promiscuously, without
reference to kith or kin. You may turn on a Baboo at any moment and be
quite sure that words, and phrases, and maxims, and proverbs will come
gurgling forth, without reference to the subject or to the occasion,
to what has gone before or to what will come after. Perhaps it was
with reference to this independence, buoyancy, and gaiety of language
that Lord Lytton declared the Bengali to be "the Irishman of India."

You know, dear Vanity, I whispered to you before that the poor Baboo
often suffers from a slight aberration of speech which prevents his
articulating the truth--a kind of moral lisp. Lord Lytton could not
have been alluding to this; for it was only yesterday that I heard an
Irishman speak the truth to Lord Lytton about some little matter--I
forget what; cotton duty, I think--and Lord Lytton said, rather
curtly, "Why, you have often told me this before." So Lord Lytton must
be in the habit of hearing certain truths from the Irish.

It was either Sir Andrew Clarke, Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, or Sir
Some-one-else, who understands all about these things, that first told
me of the tendency to Baboo worship in England at present. I
immediately took steps, when I heard of it, to capitalise my pension
and purchase gold mines in the Wynaad and shares in the Simla Bank.
(Colonel Peterson, of the Simla Fencibles, supported me gallantly in
this latter resolution.) The notion of so dreadful a form of fetishism
establishing itself in one's native land is repugnant to the feelings
even of those who have been rendered callous to such things by seats
in the Bengal Legislative Council. [I refuse to believe that the
Zoological Society has lent its apiary to this movement. It must have
been a spelling-bee your informant was thinking of.

Talking of monkey-houses reminds me of] Sir George Campbell, who took
such an interest in the development of the Baboo, and the selection of
the fittest for Government employment. He taught them in
debating-clubs the various modes of conducting irresponsible
parliamentary chatter; and he tried to encourage pedestrianism and
football to evolve their legs and bring them into something like
harmony with their long pendant arms. You can still see a few of Sir
George's leggy Baboos coiled up in corners of lecture-rooms at
Calcutta. The Calcutta Cricket Club used to employ one as permanent
"leg." [The Indian Turf Club used to keep a professional "leg," but
now there are so many amateurs it is not required.]

It is the future of Baboodom I tremble for. When they wax fat with new
religions, music, painting, Comédie Anglaise, scientific discoveries,
they may kick with those developed legs of theirs, until we shall have
to think that they are something more than a joke, more than a mere
_lusus naturæ_, more than a caricature moulded by the accretive and
differentiating impulses of the monad[C] in a moment of wanton
playfulness. The fear is that their tendencies may infect others. The
patent-leather shoes, the silk umbrellas, the ten thousand horse-power
English words and phrases, and the loose shadows of English thought,
which are now so many Aunt Sallies for all the world to fling a jeer
at, might among other races pass into _dummy soldiers_, and from dummy
soldiers into trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the
province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection. Mr.
Wordsworth and his friends the Dakhani Brahmans should consider how
painful it would be, when deprived of the consolations of religion, to
be solemnly repressed by the _Pioneer_--to be placed under that
steam-hammer which by the descent of a paragraph can equally crack the
tiniest of jokes and the hardest of political nuts, can suppress
unauthorised inquiry and crush disaffection.

At present the Baboo is merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the
course of geological ages it might harden down into something
palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise
the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so easy to
become homogeneous after you have been diluted with the physical
sciences and stirred about by Positivists and missionaries. "I would I
were a protoplastic monad!" may sound very rhythmical, poetical, and
all that; but even for a Baboo the aspiration is not an easy one to
gratify.--ALI BABA.




No. VII



WITH THE RAJA



[September 20, 1879.]

Try not to laugh, Dear Vanity. I know you don't mean anything by it;
but these Indian kings are so sensitive. The other day I was
translating to a young Raja what Val Prinsep had said about him in his
"Purple India"; he had only said that he was a dissipated young ass
and as ugly as a baboon; but the boy was quite hurt and began to cry,
and I had to send for the Political Agent to quiet him and put him to
sleep. When you consider the matter philosophically there is nothing
_per se_ ridiculous in a Raja. Take a hypothetical case: picture to
yourself a Raja who does not get drunk without some good reason, who
is not ostentatiously unfaithful to his five-and-twenty queens and his
five-and-twenty grand duchesses, who does not festoon his thorax and
abdomen with curious cutlery and jewels, who does not paint his face
with red ochre, and who sometimes takes a sidelong glance at his
affairs, and there is no reason why you should not think of such a one
as an Indian king. India is not very fastidious; so long as the
Government is satisfied, the people of India do not much care what the
Rajas are like. A peasant proprietor said to Mr. Caird and me the
other day, "We are poor cultivators; we cannot afford to keep Rajas.
The Rajas are for the Lord Sahib."

The young Maharaja of Kuch Parwani assures me that it is not
considered the thing for a Raja at the present day to govern. "A
really swell Raja amuses himself." One hoards money, another plays at
soldiering, a third is horsey, a fourth is amorous, and a fifth gets
drunk; at least so Kuch Parwani thinks. Please don't say that I told
you this. The Foreign Secretary knows what a high opinion I have of
the Rajas, and indeed he often employs me to whitewash them when they
get into scrapes. "A little playful, perhaps, but no more loyal Prince
in India!" This is the kind of thing I put into the Annual
Administration Reports of the Agencies, and I stick to it. Playful no
doubt, but a more loyal class than the Rajas there is not in India.
They have built their houses of cards on the thin crust of British
Rule that now covers the crater, and they are ever ready to pour a
pannikin of water into a crack to quench the explosive forces rumbling
below.

The amiable chief in whose house I am staying to-day is exceedingly
simple in his habits. At an early hour he issues from the zenana and
joins two or three of his thakores, or barons, who are on duty at
Court, in the morning draught of opium. They sit in a circle, and a
servant in the centre goes round and pours the _kasumbha_[D] out of a
brass bowl and through a woollen cloth into their hands, out of which
they lap it up. Then a cardamum to take away the acrid after-taste.
One hums drowsily two or three bars of an old-world song; another
clears his throat and spits; the Chief yawns, and all snap their
fingers, to prevent evil spirits skipping into his throat; a late
riser joins the circle, and all, except the Chief, give him
_tazim_--that is, rise and salaam; a coarse jest or two, and the party
disperses. A crowd of servants swarm round the Chief as he shuffles
slowly away. Three or four mace-bearers walk in front shouting, "Raja,
Maharaja salaamat ho; niga rakhiyo!" ("Please take notice; to the
King, the great King, let there be salutation!") A confidential
servant continually leans forward and whispers in his ear; another
remains close at hand with a silver tea-pot containing water and
wrapped up in a wet cloth to keep it cool; a third constantly whisks a
yak's tail over the King's head; a fourth carries my Lord's sword; a
fifth his handkerchief; and so on. Where is he going? He dawdles up a
narrow staircase, through a dark corridor, down half-a-dozen steep
steps, across a courtyard overgrown with weeds, up another staircase,
along another passage, and so to a range of heavy quilted red screens
that conceal doors leading into the female penetralia. Here we must
leave him. Two servants disappear behind the _parda_ with their
master, the others promptly lie down where they are, draw the sheets
or blankets which they have been wearing over their faces and feet,
and sleep. About noon we see the King again. He is dressed in white
flowing robes with a heavy carcanet of emeralds round his neck. His
red turban is tied with strings of seed pearls and set off with an
aigrette springing from a diamond brooch. He sits on the Royal
mattress, the _gaddi_.[E] A big bolster covered with green velvet
supports his back; his sword and shield are gracefully disposed before
him. At the corner of the _gaddi_ sits a little representation of
himself in miniature, complete even to the sword and shield. This is
his adopted son and heir. For all the queens and all the grand
duchesses are childless, and a little kinsman had to be transplanted
from a mud village among the cornfields to this dreamland palace to
perpetuate the line. On the corners of the carpet on which the _gaddi_
rests sit thakores of the Royal house, other thakores sit below, right
and left, forming two parallel lines, dwindling into sardars, palace
officers, and others of lower rank as they recede from the _gaddi_.
Behind the Chief stand the servants with the emblems of royalty--the
peacock feathers, the fan, the yak tail, and the umbrella (now
furled). The confidential servant is still whispering into the ear of
his master from time to time. This is durbar. No one speaks, unless to
exchange a languid compliment with the Chief. Presently essence of
roses and a compound of areca nut and lime are circulated, then a huge
silver pipe is brought in, the Chief takes three long pulls, the
thakores on the carpet each take a pull, and the levée breaks up amid
profound salaams. After this--dinner, opium, and sleep.

In the cool of the evening our King emerges from the palace, and,
riding on a prodigiously fat white horse with pink points, proceeds to
the place of carousal. A long train of horsemen follow him, and
footmen run before with guns in red flannel covers and silver maces,
shouting "Raja Maharaja salaamat," &c. The horsemen immediately around
him are mounted on well-fed and richly-caparisoned steeds, with all
the bravery of cloth-of-gold, yak-tails, silver chains, and strings of
shells; behind are troopers in a burlesque of English uniform; and
altogether in the rear is a mob of caitiffs on skeleton chargers,
masquerading in every degree of shabbiness and rags, down to nakedness
and a sword. The cavalcade passes through the city. The inhabitants
pour out of every door and bend to the ground. Red cloths and white
veils flutter at the casements overhead. You would hardly think that
the spectacle was one daily enjoyed by the city. There is all the
hurrying and eagerness of novelty and curiosity. Here and there a
little shy crowd of women gather at a door and salute the Chief with a
loud shrill verse of discordant song. It is some national song of the
Chiefs ancestors and of the old heroic days. The place of carousal is
a bare spot near a large and ancient well out of which grows a vast
pipal tree. Hard by is a little temple surmounted by a red flag on a
drooping bamboo. It is here that the _Gangôr_[F] and _Dassahra_[F]
solemnities are celebrated. Arrived on the ground, the Raja slowly
circles his horse; then, jerking the thorn-bit, causes him to advance
plunging and rearing, but dropping first on the near foot and then on
the off foot with admirable precision; and finally, making the white
monster, now in a lather of sweat, rise up and walk a few steps on his
hind legs, the Raja's performance concludes amid many shouts of wonder
and delight from the smooth-tongued courtiers. The thakores and
sardars now exhibit their skill in the _manége_ until the shades of
night fall, when torches are brought, amid much salaaming, and the
cavalcade defiles, through the city, back to the palace. Lights are
twinkling from the higher casements and reflected on the lake below;
the _gola_[G] slave-girls are singing plaintive songs, drum and conch
answer from the open courtyards. The palace is awake. The Raja, we
will romantically presume, bounds lightly from his horse and dances
gaily to the harem to fling himself voluptuously into the luxurious
arms of one of the five-and-twenty queens, or one of the
five-and-twenty grand duchesses; and they stand for one delirious
moment wreathed in each other's embraces--

        While soft there breathes
      Through the cool casement, mingled with the sighs
      Of moonlight flowers, music that seems to rise
      From some still lake, so liquidly it rose,
      And, as it swell'd again at each faint close,
      The ear could track through all that maze of chords
      And young sweet voices these impassioned words--

"Ho, you there! fetch us a pint of gin! and look sharp, will you!"

      For who, in time, knows whither we may vent
      The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
      This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
      To enrich unknowing nations with our stores!
      What worlds in the yet unformèd Orient
      May come refined with accents that are ours!

But, dear Vanity, I can see that you are impatient of scenes whose
luxuries steal, spite of yourself, too deep into your soul; besides, I
dread the effect of such warm situations on a certain Zuleika to whom
the note of Ali Baba is like the thrice-distilled strains of the
bulbul on Bendemeer's stream. So let us electrify ourselves back to
prose and propriety by thinking of the Political Agent; let us plunge
into the cold waters of dreary reality by conjuring up a figure in
tail-coat and gold buttons dispensing justice while H.H. the romantic
and picturesque Raja, G.C.S.I., amuses himself. Yet we hear cries from
the gallery of "Vive M. le Raja; vive la bagatelle!"

So say we, in faint echoes, defying the anathemas of the Foreign
Office. Do not turn this beautiful temple of ancient days into a mere
mill for decrees and budgets; but sweep it and purify it, and render
it a fitting shrine for the homage and tribute of antique
loyalty--"that proud submission, that subordination of the heart which
kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom." With tail-coat and cocked-hat government "the unbought grace
of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone."--ALI BABA.




No. VIII



WITH THE POLITICAL AGENT



A MAN IN BUCKRAM



[Illustration: THE POLITICAL AGENT--"A man in buckram."]




[September 27, 1879.]

This is a most curious product of the Indian bureaucracy. Nothing in
all White Baboodom is so wonderful as the Political Agent. A near
relation of the Empress who was travelling a good deal about India
some three or four years ago said that he would rather get a Political
Agent, with raja, chuprassies,[H] and everything complete, to take
home, than the unfigured "mum" of Beluchistan, or the sea-aye-ee
mocking bird, _Kokiolliensis Lyttonia_. But the Political Agent cannot
be taken home. The purple bloom fades in the scornful climate of
England; the paralytic swagger passes into sheer imbecility; the
thirteen-gun tall talk reverberates in jeering echoes; the chuprassies
are only so many black men, and the raja is felt to be a joke. The
Political Agent cannot live beyond Aden.

The Government of India keeps its Political Agents scattered over the
native states in small jungle stations. It furnishes them with
maharajas, nawabs, rajas, and chuprassies, according to their rank,
and it usually throws in a house, a gaol, a doctor, a volume of
Aitchison's Treaties, an escort of native Cavalry, a Star of India,
an assistant, the powers of a first-class magistrate, a flag-staff,
six camels, three tents, and a salute of eleven or thirteen
guns. In very many cases the Government of India nominates
a Political Agent to the rank of Son-to-a-Lieut.-Governor,
Son-in-Law-to-a-Lieut.-Governor, Son-to-a-member-of-Council, or
Son-to-an-agent-to-the-Governor-General. Those who are thus elevated
to the Anglo-Indian peerage need have no thought for the morrow what
they shall do, what they shall say, or wherewithal they shall be
supplied with a knowledge of Oriental language and occidental law.
Nature clothes them with increasing quantities of gold lace and starry
ornaments, and that charming, if unblushing, female--Lord Lytton begs
me to write "maid"--Miss Anglo-Indian Promotion, goes skipping about
among them like a joyful kangaroo.

The Politicals are a Greek chorus in our popular burlesque, "Empire."
The Foreign Secretary is the prompter. The company is composed of
nawabs and rajas (with the Duke of Buckingham as a "super"). Lord
Meredith is the scene-shifter; Sir John, the manager. The Secretary of
State, with his council, is in the stage-box; the House of Commons in
the stalls; the London Press in the gallery; the East Indian
Association, Exeter Hall, Professor Fawcett, Mr. Hyndman, and the
criminal classes generally, in the pit; while those naughty little
Scotch boys, the shock-headed Duke and Monty Duff, who once tried to
turn down the lights, pervade the house with a policeman on their
horizon. As we enter the theatre a dozen chiefs are dancing in the
ballet to express their joy at the termination of the Afghan War. The
political _choreutæ_ are clapping their hands, encouraging them by
name and pointing them out to the gallery.

The government of a native state by clerks and chuprassies, with a
beautiful _fainéant_ Political Agent for Sundays and Hindu festivals,
is, I am told, a thing of the past. Colonel Henderson, the imperial
"Peeler," tells me so, and he ought to know, for he is a kind of
demi-official superintendent of Thugs and Agents. Nowadays, my
informant assures me, the Political Agents undergo a regular training
in a Madras Cavalry Regiment or in the Central India Horse, or on the
Viceroy's Staff, and if they have to take charge of a Mahratta State
they are obliged to pass an examination in classical Persian poetry.
This is as it ought to be. The intricacies of Oriental intrigue and
the manifold complication of tenure and revenue that entangle
administrative procedure in the protected principalities, will unravel
themselves in presence of men who have enjoyed such advantages.

When I first came out to this country I was placed in charge of three
degrees of latitude and eight of longitude in Rajputana that I might
learn the language. The soil was sandy, the tenure feudal
(_zabardast_,[I] as we call it in India), and the Raja a lunatic by
nature and a dipsomaniac by education. He had been educated by his
grandmamma and the hereditary Minister. I found that his grandmamma
and the hereditary Minister were most anxious to relieve me of the
most embarrassing details of government, so I handed them a copy of
the Ten Commandments, underlining two that I thought might be useful,
and put them in charge. They were old-fashioned in their methods--like
Sir Billy Jones; but the result was admirable. In two years the
revenue was reduced from ten to two lakhs of rupees, and the
expenditure proportionately increased. A bridge, a summer-house, and a
school were built; and I wrote the longest "Administration Report"
that has ever issued from the Zulmabad Residency. When I left money
was so cheap and lightly regarded that I sold my old buggy horse for
two thousand rupees to grandmamma, with many mutual expressions of
good-will--through a curtain--and I have not been paid to this day.
But since then the horse-market has been ruined in the native states
by these imperial _mélas_[J] and durbars. A poor Political has no
chance against these Government of India people, who come down with
strings of three-legged horses, and--no, I won't say they sell them to
the chiefs--I should be having a commission of my _khidmatgars_[K]
sitting upon me, like poor Har Sahai, who was beaten by Mr. Saunders,
and Malhar Rao Gaikwar, who fancied his Resident was going to poison
him.

I like to see a Political up at Simla wooing that hoyden Promotion in
her own sequestered bower. It is good to see Hercules toiling at the
feet of Omphale. It is good to see Pistol fed upon leeks by
Under-Secretaries and women. How simple he is! How boyish he can be,
and yet how intense! He will play leap frog at Annandale; he will
paddle about in the stream below the water-falls without shoes and
stockings; but if you allude in the most distant way to rajas or
durbars, he lets down his face a couple of holes and talks like a
weather prophet. He will be so interesting that you can hardly bear
it; so interesting that you will feel sorry he is not talking to the
Governor-General up at Peterhoff.

[But I feel that an Agent to the Governor-General is looking over my
shoulder, so perhaps I had better stop; though I know two or three
things about Politicals.]--SIR ALI BABA, K.C.B.[L]




No. IX



WITH THE COLLECTOR



[October 4, 1879.]

Was it not the Bishop of Bombay who said that man was an automaton
plus the mirror of consciousness? The Government of every Indian
province is an automaton plus the mirror of consciousness. The
Secretariat is consciousness, and the Collectors form the automaton.
The Collector works, and the Secretariat observes and registers.

To the people of India the Collector is the Imperial Government. He
watches over their welfare in the many facets which reflect our
civilisation. He establishes schools and dispensaries [for their
children], gaols [for their troublesome relations and neighbours], and
courts of justice [for the benefit of their brothers who can talk and
write]. He levies the rent of their fields, he fixes the tariff, and
he nominates to every appointment, from that of road-sweeper or
constable, to the great blood-sucking officers round the Court and
Treasury. As for Boards of Revenue and Lieutenant-Governors who
occasionally come sweeping across the country, with their locust hosts
of servants and petty officials, they are but an occasional nightmare;
while the Governor-General is a mere shadow in the background of
thought, half blended with "John Company Bahadur" and other myths of
the dawn.

The Collector lives in a long rambling bungalow furnished with folding
chairs and tables, and in every way marked by the provisional
arrangements of camp life. He seems to have just arrived from out of
the firmament of green fields and mango groves that encircles the
little station where he lives; or he seems just about to pass away
into it again. The shooting-howdahs are lying in the verandah, the
elephant of a neighbouring landowner is swinging his hind foot to and
fro under a tree, or switching up straw and leaves on to his back, a
dozen camels are lying down in a circle making bubbling noises, and
tents are pitched here and there to dry, like so many white wings on
which the whole establishment is about to rise and fly away--fly away
into "the district," which is the correct expression for the vast
expanse of level plain melting into blue sky on the wide
horizon-circle around.

The Collector is a bustling man. He is always in a hurry. His
multitudinous duties succeed one another so fast that one is never
ended before the next begins. A mysterious thing called "the Joint"
comes gleaning after him, I believe, and completes the inchoate work.

The verandah is full of fat black men in clean linen waiting for
interviews. They are bankers, shopkeepers, and landholders, who have
only come to "pay their respects," with ever so little a petition as a
corollary. The chuprassie-vultures hover about them. Each of these
obscene fowls has received a gratification from each of the clean fat
men; else the clean fat men would not be in the verandah. This import
tax is a wholesome restraint upon the excessive visiting tendencies of
wealthy men of colour. [Several little groups of] brass dishes filled
with pistachio nuts and candied sugar are ostentatiously displayed
here and there; they are the oblations of the would-be visitors. The
English call these offerings "dollies"; the natives _dáli_. They
represent in the profuse East the visiting cards of the meagre West.

Although from our lofty point of observation, among the pine-trees,
the Collector seems to be of the smallest social calibre, a mere
carronade, not to be distinguished by any proper name; in his own
district he is a Woolwich Infant; and a little community of
microscopicals,--doctors, engineers, inspectors of schools, and
assistant magistrates, look up to him as to a magnate.

They tell little stories of his weaknesses and eccentricities, and his
wife is considered a person entitled "to give herself airs" (within
the district) if she feels so disposed; while to their high dinners is
allowed the use of champagne and "Europe" talk on æsthetic subjects.
The Collector is not, however, permitted to wear a chimney-pot hat and
gloves on Sunday (unless he has been in the Provincial Secretariat as
a boy); a Terai hat is sufficient for a Collector.

A Collector is usually a sportsman; when he is a poet, a
co-respondent, or a neologist it is thought rather a pity; and he is
spoken of in undertones. Neology is considered especially
reprehensible. The junior member of the Board of Revenue, or even the
Commissioner of a division (if he be _pukka_)[M], may question the
literal inspiration of Genesis; but it is not good form for a
Collector to tamper with his Bible. A Collector should have no leisure
for opinions of any sort.

I have said that a Collector is usually a sportsman. In this capacity
he is frequently made use of by the Viceroy and long-shore Governors,
as he is an adept at showing sport to globe-trotters. The villagers
who live on the borders of the jungle will generally turn out and beat
for the Collector, and the petty chief who owns the jungle always
keeps a tiger or two for district officers. A Political Agent's tiger
is known to be a domestic animal suitable for delicate noble Lords
travelling for health; but a Collector's tiger is often [believed to
be almost] a wild beast, although usually reared upon buffalo calves
and accustomed to be driven. [Of course the tiger which the Collector
and his friends shoot is quite an inferior article; a fierce, roaming
creature that lives upon spotted deer when it can get them, but is
often quite savage from hunger.] The Collector, who is always the most
unselfish and hospitable of men, only kills the fatted tiger for
persons of distinction with letters of introduction. Any common jungle
tiger, even a man-eater, is good enough for himself and his friends.

The Collector never ventures to approach Simla, when on leave. At
Simla people would stare and raise their eye-brows if they heard that
a Collector was on the hill. They would ask what sort of a thing a
Collector was. The Press Commissioner would be sent to interview it.
The children at Peterhoff would send for it to play with. So the
clodhopping Collector goes to Naini Tal or Darjiling, where he is
known either as Ellenborough Higgins, or Higgins of Gharibpur in
territorial fashion. Here he is understood. Here he can bubble of his
_Bandobast_,[N] his _Balbacha_[O] and his _Bawarchikhana_;[P] and here
he can speak in familiar accents of his neighbours, Dalhousie Smith
and Cornwallis Jones. All day long he strides up and down the club
verandah with his old Haileybury chum Teignmouth Tompkins; and they
compare experiences of the hunting-field and office, and denounce in
unmeasured terms of Oriental vituperation the new sort of civilian who
moves about with the Penal Code under his arm and measures his
authority by statute, clause, and section.

In England the Collector is to be found riding at anchor in the
Bandicoot Club. He makes two or three hurried cruises to his native
village, where he finds himself half forgotten. This sours him. The
climate seems worse than of old, the means of locomotion at his
disposal are inconvenient and expensive; he yearns for the sunshine
and elephants of Gharibpur, and returns an older and a quieter man.
The afternoon of life is throwing longer shadows, the Acheron of
promotion is gaping before him; he falls into a Commissionership;
still deeper into an officiating seat on the Board of Revenue.
_Facilis est descensus, etc._ Nothing will save him now;
transmigration has set in; the gates of Simla fly open; it is all
over. Let us pray that his halo may fit him.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. X



BABY IN PARTIBUS



[October 11, 1879.]

The Empire has done less for Anglo-Indian Babies than for any class of
the great exile community. Legislation provides them with neither
rattle nor coral, privilege leave nor pension. Papa has a Raja and
Star of India to play with; Mamma the Warrant of Precedence and the
Hill Captains; but Baby has nothing--not even a missionary; Baby is
without the amusement of the meanest cannibal.

Baby is debarred from the society of his compatriots. His father is
cramped and frozen with the chill cares of office; his mother is
deadened by the gloomy routine of economy and fashion; custom lies
upon her with a weight heavy as frost and deep almost as life; the
fountains of natural fancy and mirth are frozen over; so Baby lisps
his dawn pæans in soft Oriental accents, wakening harmonious echoes
amongst those impulsive and impressionable children of Nature that
masque themselves in the black slough of Bearers and Ayahs; and Baby
blubbers in Hindustani.

These Ayah and Bearer people sit with Baby in the verandah on a little
carpet; broken toys and withered flowers lie around. They croon to
Baby some old-world _katabaukalesis_, while beauty, born of murmuring
sound, passes into Baby's eyes. The squirrel sits chirruping
familiarly on the edge of the verandah with his tail in the air and
some uncracked pericarp in his uplifted hands, the kite circles aloft
and whistles a shrill and mournful note, the sparrows chatter, the
crow clears his throat, the minas scream discordantly, and Baby's
soft, receptive nature thus absorbs an Indian language. Very soon Baby
will think from right to left, and will lisp in the luxuriant bloom of
Oriental hyperbole. [Presently, when Baby grows a little older, Baby
will say to the Bearer, through his sweet little nose, "Arreh! Ulu ka
bacha, tu kya karta hai?" Which being interpreted, is, "Ah! Child of
night's sweet bird, what dost thou now?" Afterwards Baby will learn to
say many other things which it is not good to repeat here.]

In the evening Baby will go out for an airing with the Bearer and Ayah
people, and while they dawdle along the dusty road, or sit on
kerb-stones and on culvert parapets, he will listen to the extensile
tale of their simple sorrows. He will hear, with a sigh, that the
profits of petty larceny are declining; he will be taught to regret
the increasing infirmities of his Papa's temper; and portraits in
sepia of his Mamma will be observed by him to excite laughter mingled
with dark impulsive words. Thus there will pass into Baby's eyes
glances of suspicious questionings, "the blank misgivings of a
creature moving about in worlds not realised."

In the long summer days Baby will patter listlessly about the darkened
rooms accompanied by his suite, who will carry a feeding bottle--Maw's
Patent Feeding Bottle--just as the Sergeant-at-Arms carries the mace;
and, from time to time, little Mister Speaker will squat down on his
dear little hams and take a refreshing pull or two. At breakfast and
luncheon time little Mister Speaker will straggle into the
dining-room, and fond parents will give him a tidbit of many soft
dainties, to be washed down with brandy and water, beer, sherry, or
other alcoholic draught. On such broken meals Baby is raised.

The little drawn face, etiolated and weary-looking, recommends sleep;
but Baby is a bad sleeper. The Bearer-in-waiting carries about a small
pillow all day long, and from time to time Baby is applied to it. He
frets and cries, and they brood over him humming some old Indian song,
["Keli Blai," or "Hillu Milli Pania"]. Still he turns restlessly and
whimpers, though they pat him and shampoo him, and call him fond names
and tell him soothing stories of bulbuls and flowers and woolly sheep.
But Baby does not sleep, and even Indian patience is exhausted. Both
Ayah and Bearer would like to slip away to their mud houses at the
other end of the compound and have a pull at the fragrant _huqqa_ and
a gossip with the _saices;_[Q] but while _Sunny Baba_ is at large, and
might at any moment make a raid on Mamma, who is dozing over a novel
on a spider-chair near the mouth of the thermantidote, the Ayah and
Bearer dare not leave their charge. So _Sunny Baba_ must sleep, and
the Bearer has in the folds of his waist-cloth a little black fragment
of the awful sleep-compeller, and Baby is drugged into a deep uneasy
sleep of delirious, racking dreams.

Day by day Baby grows paler, day by day thinner, day by day a stranger
light burns in his bonny eyes. Weird thoughts sweep through Baby's
brain, weird questions startle Mamma out of the golden languors in
which she is steeped, weird words frighten the gentle Ayah as she
fondles her darling. The current of babble and laughter has almost
ceased to flow. Baby lies silent in the Ayah's lap staring at the
ceiling. He clasps a broken toy with wasted fingers. His Bearer comes
with some old watchword of fun; Baby smiles faintly, but makes no
response. The old man takes him tenderly in his arms and carries him
to the verandah; Baby's head falls heavily on his shoulder.

The outer world lies dimly round Baby; within, strange shadows are
flitting by. The wee body is pressing heavily upon the spirit; Baby is
becoming conscious of the burthen. He will be quiet for hours on his
little cot; he does not sleep, but he dreams. Earth's joys and lights
are fast fading out of those resilient eyes; Baby's spirit is waiting
on the shores of eternity, and already hears "the mighty waters
rolling evermore."

The broken toys are swept away into a corner, a silence and fear has
fallen upon the household, black servants weep, their mistress seeks
refuge in headache and smelling salts, the hard father feels a
strange, an irrepressible welling up of little memories. He loves the
golden haired boy; he hardly knew it before. If he could only hear
once more the merry laugh, the chatter and the shouting! But he cannot
hear it any more; he will never hear his child's voice again. Baby has
passed into the far-away Thought-World. Baby is now only a dream and a
memory, only the recollection of a music that is heard no more. Baby
has crossed that cloudy, storm-driven bourn of speculation and fear
whither we are all tending.

      A few white bones upon a lonely sand,
      A rotting corpse beneath the meadow grass,
      That cannot hear the footsteps as they pass,
      Memorial urns pressed by some foolish hand
      Have been for all the goal of troublous fears,
      Ah! breaking hearts and faint eyes dim with tears,
      And momentary hope by breezes framed
      To flame that ever fading falls again,
      And leaves but blacker night and deeper pain,
      Have been the mould of life in every land.

Baby is planted out for evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery
that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died.
Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing
mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption.
Through sunshine and rain, through the long days of summer, through
the long nights of winter, for ever, for ever, Baby lies silent and
dreamless under that waving grass. The bee will hum overhead for
evermore, and the swallow glance among the cypress. The butterfly will
flutter for ages and ages among the rank flowers--Baby will still lie
there. Come away, come away; your cheeks are pale; it cannot be, we
cannot believe it, we must not remember it; other Baby voices will
kindle our life and love, Baby's toys will pass to other Baby hands.
All will change; we will change.

      Yet, darling, but come back to me;
      Whatever change the years have wrought,
      I find not yet one lonely thought
      That cries against my wish for thee.

                                          ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XI



THE RED CHUPRASSIE

OR, THE CORRUPT LICTOR[R]



[October 18, 1879.]

The red chuprassie is our Colorado beetle, our potato disease, our
Home ruler, our cupboard skeleton, the little rift in our lute. The
red-coated chuprassie is a cancer in our Administration. To be rid of
it there is hardly any surgical operation we would not cheerfully
undergo. You might extract the Bishop of Bombay, amputate the Governor
of Madras, put a seton in the pay and allowances of the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and we should smile.

The red chuprassie is ubiquitous; he is in the verandah of every
official's house in India, from the Governor-General downwards; he is
in the portico of every Court of Justice, every Treasury, every Public
Office, every Government School, every Government Dispensary in the
country. He walks behind the Collector; he follows the conservancy
carts; he prowls about the candidate for employment; he hovers over
the accused and accuser; he haunts the Raja; he infests the tax-payer.

He wears the Imperial livery; he is to the entire population of India
the exponent of British Rule; he is the mother-in-law of liars, the
high-priest of extortioners, and the receiver-general of bribes.

Through this refracting medium the people of India see their rulers.
The chuprassie paints his master in colours drawn from his own black
heart. Every lie he tells, every insinuation he throws out, every
demand he makes, is endorsed with his master's name. He is the
arch-slanderer of our name in India.

[He is not an individual--he is a member of a widely rammified
society.] There is no city in India, no mofussil-station, no little
settlement of officials far up country, in which the chuprassie does
not find sworn brothers and confederates. The cutcherry clerks and the
police are with him everywhere; higher native officials are often on
his side.

He sits at the receipt of custom in the Collector's verandah, and no
native visitor dare approach who has not conciliated him with money.
The candidate for employment, educated in our schools, and pregnant
with words about purity, equality, justice, political economy, and all
the rest of it, addresses him with joined hands as "Maharaj," and
slips silver into his itching palm. The successful place-hunter pays
him a feudal relief on receiving office or promotion, and benevolences
flow in from all who have anything to hope or fear from those in
power.

[Illustration: THE RED CHUPRASSIE--"The corrupt lictor."]

In the Native States the chuprassie flourishes rampantly. He receives
a regular salary through their representatives or vakils at the
agencies, from all the native chiefs round about, and on all occasions
of visits or return visits, durbars, religious festivals, or public
ceremonials, he claims and receives preposterous fees. The Rajas,
whose dignity is always exceedingly delicate, stand in great fear of
the chuprassies. They believe that on public occasions the chuprassies
have sometimes the power of sicklying them o'er with the pale cast of
neglect.

English officers who have become de-Europeanised from long residence
among undomesticated natives, or by the habitual performance of petty
ceremonial duties of an Oriental hue, employ chuprassies to aggrandise
their importance. They always figure on a background of red
chuprassies. Such officials are what Lord Lytton calls White Baboos.

[Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his own artless way, once proposed legislating
against chuprassies, I am told. His plan was to include them among the
criminal classes, and hand them over to Major Henderson, the
Director-General of Thuggee and Dacoity; but this functionary, viewing
the matter in a different light, made some demi-official
representation to the Legal Member under the pseudonym of "Walker,"
and the subject dropped.]

A great Maharaja once told me that it was the tyranny of the
Government chuprassies that made him take to drink. He spoke of them
as "the Pindarries of modern India." He had a theory that the small
pay we gave them accounted for their evil courses. A chuprassie gets
about eight pounds sterling a year. He added that if we saw a
chuprassie on seven rupees a month living overtly at the rate of a
thousand, we ought immediately to appoint him an _attaché_ or put him
in gaol.

I make a simple rule in my own establishment of dismissing a
chuprassie as soon as he begins to wax fat. A native cannot become
rich without waxing fat, because wealth is primarily enjoyed by the
mild Gentoo as a means of procuring greasy food in large quantities.
His secondary enjoyment is to sit upon it. He digs a hole in the
ground for his rupees, and broods over them, like a great obscene
fowl. If you see a native sitting very hard on the same place day
after day, you will find it worth your while to dig him up. Shares in
this are better than the Madras gold mines.

In early Company days, when the Empire was a baby, the European
writers[S] regarded with a kindly eye those profuse Orientals who went
about bearing gifts; but Lord Clive closed this branch of the
business, and it has been taken up by our scarlet runners or verandah
parasites, in our name. Now, dear Vanity, you may call me a
Russophile, or by any other marine term of endearment you like, if I
don't think the old plan was the better of the two. We ourselves could
conduct corruption decently; but to be responsible for corruption over
which we exercise no control is to lose the credit of a good name and
the profits of a bad one.

[Old qui-hyes tell you that there are three things you cannot separate
from an "Indian"--venality, perjury, and rupees. Now I totally
disagree with the old qui-hyes. In secret I am a great admirer of the
Indian, and publicly I always treat him with respect. I have such a
regard for him that I never expose him to temptation. I pay him well,
I explain to him my eccentric opinions about receiving bribes, and I
remind him of the moral and electrifying properties of the different
species of cane which Nature has so thoughtfully provided nearly
everywhere in India. The consequence is that my chuprassies do not
soil their hands with spurious gratifications, and figuratively
describe me as their father and mother.]

I hear that the Government of India proposes to form a mixed committee
of Rajas and chuprassies to discuss the question as to whether native
chiefs ever give bribes and native servants ever take them. It is
expected that a report favourable to Indian morality will be the
result. Of course Raja Joe Hookham will preside.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XII



THE PLANTER



A FARMER PRINCE


[Illustration: THE PLANTER--"A farmer prince."]



[October 25, 1879]

The Planter lives to-day as we all lived fifty years ago. He lives in
state and bounty, like the Lord of Burleigh. He lives like that fine
old English gentleman who had an old estate, and who kept up his old
mansion at a bountiful old rate. He lives in a grand wholesale manner;
he lives in round numbers; he lives like a hero. Everything is Homeric
about him. He establishes himself firmly in the land with great joy
and plenty; and he gathers round him all that makes life full-toned
and harmonious, from the grand timbre of draught-ale and the
organ-thunder of hunting, to the piccolo and tintinnabulum of Poker
and maraschino. His life is a fresco-painting, on which some Cyclopæan
Raphaelite has poured his rainbows from a fire-engine of a hundred
elephant-power.

We paltry officials live meanly in pen-and-ink sketches. Our little
life is bounded by a dream of promotion and pension. We toil, we
slave; we put by money, we pinch ourselves. We are hardly fit to live
in this beautiful world, with its laughing girls and grapes, its
summer seas, its sunshine and flowers, its Garnet Wolseleys and
bulbuls. We go moping through its glories in green spectacles,
befouling it with our loathsome statistics and reports. The sweet air
of heaven, the blue firmament, and the everlasting hills do not
satisfy our poisoned hearts; so we make to ourselves a little tin-pot
world of blotted-paper, debased rupees, graded lists, and tinsel
honours; we try to feed our lungs on its typhoidal effluvia. Aroint[T]
thee, Comptroller and Accountant-General with all thy grisly crew!
Thou art worse than the blind Fury with the abhorred shears; for thou
slittest my thin-spun pay-wearing spectacles, thrice branded varlet!
[There is a lily on my brow with anguish moist and fever-dew, and on
my cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too, and for these emblems of
woe thou shalt have to give an answer.]

Dear Vanity, of course you understand that I do not allude to the
amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the
mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my
own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment
when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury slinging
flame].

Let us soothe ourselves by contemplating the Planter and his generous,
simple life. It calms one to look at him. He is something placid,
strong, and easeful. Without wishing to appear obsequious, I always
feel disposed to borrow money when I meet a substantial Planter. He
inspires confidence. I grasp his strong hand; I take him
(figuratively) to my heart, while the desire to bank with him wells up
mysteriously in my bosom.

He lives in a grand old bungalow, surrounded by ancient trees. Large
rooms open into one another on every side in long vistas; a broad and
hospitable-looking verandah girds all. Everywhere trophies of the
chase meet the eye. We walk upon cool matting; we recline upon
long-armed chairs; low and heavy punkahs swing overhead; a sweet
breathing of wet _khaskhas_ grass comes sobbing out of the
thermantidote; and a gigantic but gentle _khidmatgar_ is always at our
elbow with long glasses on a silver tray. This man's name is Nubby
Bux, but he means nothing by it, and a child might play with him. I
often say to him in a caressing tone, "_Peg lao_";[U] and he is
grateful for any little attention of this sort.

It is near noon. My friend Mr. Great-Heart, familiarly known as "Jamie
Macdonald," has been taking me over the factory and stables. We have
been out since early morning on the jumpiest and beaniest of Waler
mares. I am not killed, but a good deal shaken. The glass trembles in
my hand. I have an absorbing thirst, and I drink copiously, almost
passionately. My out-stretched legs are reposing on the arms of my
chair and I stiffen into an attitude of rest. I hear my host splashing
and singing in his tub.

Breakfast is a meal conceived in a large and liberal spirit. We pass
from dish to dish through all the compass of a banquet, the diapason
closing full in beer. Several joyful assistants, whose appetites would
take first-class honours at any university or cattle show, join the
hunt and are well in at the beer. What tales are told! I feel glad
that Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Mary Somerville, and Dr. Watts are
not present. I keep looking round to see that no bishop comes into the
room. It is a comfort to me to think that Bishop Heber is dead. I gave
up blushing five years ago when I entered the Secretariat; but if at
this moment Sir William Jones were to enter, or Mr. Whitley Stokes
with his child-like heart and his Cymric vocabulary, I believe I
should be strangely affected.

The day welters on through drink and billiards. In the afternoon more
joyful Planters drop in, and we play a rubber. From whist to the polo
ground, where I see the merry men of Tirhoot play the best and fastest
game that the world can show. At night carousals and potations pottle
deep. Next morning sees the entire party in the _khadar_[V] of the
river, mounted on Arabs, armed with spears, hunting Jamie Macdonald's
Caledonian boar. These Scotchmen never forget their nationality.

And while these joyful Planters are thus rejoicing, the indigo is
growing silently all round. While they play, Nature works for them. So
does the patient black man; he smokes his _huqqa_ and keeps an eye on
the rising crop.

You will have learnt from Mr. Caird that indigo grows in cakes (the
ale is imported); to his description of the process of manufacture I
can only add that the juice is generally expressed in the vernacular.
You give a cake of the raw material to a coloured servant, you stand
over him to see that he doesn't eat it, and your assistant canes him
slowly as he squeezes the juice into a blue bottle. Blue pills are
made of the refuse; your female servants use aniline dyes; and there
you are. If any one dies in any other way you can refuse him the rites
of cremation; fine him four annas; and warn him not to do it again.
This is a burning question in Tirhoot and occasions much litigation.

Jamie Macdonald has now a contract for dyeing the Blue ribbons of the
Turf; Tommy Begg has taken the blue boars and the Oxford Blues; and
Bobby Thomas does the blue-books and the True Blues. It may not be
generally known that the aristocracy do not employ aniline dyes for
their blue blood. The minor Planters do business chiefly in blue
stockings, blue bonnets, blue bottles, blue beards, and blue coats.
For more information of this kind I can only refer you to Mr. Caird
and the _Nineteenth Century_.

Some Planters grow tea, coffee, lac, mother-of-pearl, pickles,
poppadums and curry powder--but now I am becoming encyclopædic and
scientific, and trespassing on ground already taken up by the Famine
Commission.

Fewer Planters are killed now by wild camels who roam over the mango
fields, but a good deal of damage is still done to the prickly
pear-trees. Mr. Cunningham has written an interesting note on this.
Rewards have still to be offered for dead tigers and persons who have
died of starvation. "When the Government will not give a doit to
relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."--
ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XIII



THE EURASIAN



A STUDY IN CHIARO-OSCURO



[Illustration: THE EURASIAN--"A study in chiaro oscuro."]



[November 1, 1879.]

The Anglo-Indian has a very fine eye for colour. He will mark down
"one anna in the rupee" with unerring certainty; he will suspect
smaller coin. He will tell you how he can detect an adulterated
European by his knuckles, his nails, his eyebrows, his pronunciation
of the vowels, and his conception of propriety in dress, manner, and
conduct.

To the thorough-bred Anglo-Indian, whose blood has distilled through
Haileybury for three generations, and whose cousins to the fourth
degree are Collectors and Indian Army Colonels, the Eurasian, however
fair he may be, is a _bête noir_. Mrs. Ellenborough Higgins is always
setting or pointing at black blood.

And sometimes the whitey-brown man is objectionable. He is vain, apt
to take offence, sly, indolent, sensuous, and, like Reuben, "unstable
as water." He has a facile smile, a clammy hand, a manner either
forward or obsequious, a mincing gait, and not always the snowiest
linen. [In very dangerous cases he has a peculiar smell.]

Towards natives the Eurasian is cold, haughty, and formal; and this
attitude is repaid, with interest, in scorn and hatred. There is no
concealing the fact that to the mild Gentoo the Eurasian is a very
distasteful object.

But having said this, the case for the prosecution closes, and we may
turn to the many soft and gentle graces which the Eurasian develops.

In all the relations of family life the Eurasian is admirable. He is a
dutiful son, a circumspect husband, and an affectionate father. He
seldom runs through a fortune; he hardly ever elopes with a young lady
of fashion; he is not in the habit of cutting off his son with a
shilling; and he is an infrequent worshipper in that Temple of
Separation where _Decrees Nisi_ sever the Gordian knots of Hymen.

As a citizen he is zealously loyal. He will speak at municipal
meetings, write letters about drainage and conservancy to the papers,
observe local holidays in his best clothes, and attend funerals.

The Eurasian is a methodical and trustworthy clerk, and often occupies
a position of great trust and responsibility in our public offices. He
is not bold or original, like Sir Andrew Clarke; or amusing, like Mr.
Stokes; but he does what work is given him to do without overstepping
the modesty of nature.

[Most Eurasians are Catholics; but some belong to the small Protestant
heresies and call themselves Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and what not.
To whatever creed they attach themselves, they are faithful and
devoted; but the pageantry, the music, the antiquity, and the mystery
of the ancient Church, draw forth, with the most potent spells, the
fervour of their warm, emotional natures. They are never sceptical:
the harder a doctrine is to believe the more they like it; the more
improbable a tradition is the more tenaciously they cling to it. They
are attracted by the supernatural and the horrible; they would not
bate a single saint or devil of the complete faith to rescue all the
truths of modern science from the ban of the Church.]

The Eurasian girl is often pretty and graceful; and, if the solution
of India in her veins be weak, there is an unconventionality and
_naïveté_ sometimes which undoubtedly has a charm; and which, my dear
friend, J.H----, of the 110th Clodhoppers (Lord Cardwell's Own
Clodhoppers) never could resist: "What though upon her lips there hung
the accents of the tchi-tchi tongue."

A good many Eurasians who are not clerks in public offices, or
telegraph signallers, or merchants, are loafers. They are passed on
wherever they are found, to the next station, and thus they are kept
in healthy circulation throughout India. They are all in search of
employment on the railway; but as a provisional arrangement, to meet
the more immediate and pressing exigencies of life, they will accept a
small gratuity, [or engage themselves in snapping up unconsidered
trifles]. They are mainly supported by municipalities, who keep them
in brandy, rice, and railway-tickets out of funds raised for this
purpose. Workhouses and Malacca canes have still to be tried.

Bishop Gell's plan for colonising the Laccadives and Cocos with these
loafers has not met with much acceptance at Simla. The Home Secretary
does not see from what Imperial fund they can be supplied with
bathing-drawers and barrel-organs; but the Home Secretary ought to
know that there is a philanthropic society at Lucknow of the
disinterested, romantic, Turnerelli type, ready to furnish all the
wants of a young colony, from underclothing to Eno's fruit salt.

A great many wise proposals emanate from Simla as regards some
artificial future for the Eurasian. One Ten-thousand-pounder asks
Creation in a petulant tone of surprise why Creation does not make the
Eurasian a carpenter; another looks round the windy hills and wonders
why somebody does not make the Eurasian a high farmer. The shovel hats
are surprised that the Eurasian does not become a missionary, or a
schoolmaster, or a policeman, or something of that sort. The native
papers say, "Deport him"; the white prints say, "Make him a soldier";
and the Eurasian himself says, "Make me a Commissioner, or give me a
pension." In the meantime, while nothing is being done, we can rail at
the Eurasian for not being as we are.

      "Let us sit on the thrones
        In a purple sublimity,
      And grind down men's bones
        To a pale unanimity."

There is no proper classification of the mixed race in India as there
is in America. The convenient term _quadroon_, for instance, instead
of "four annas in the rupee," is quite unknown; the consequence is
that every one--from Anna Maria de Souza, the "Portuguese" cook, a
nobleman on whose cheek the best shoe-blacking would leave a white
mark, to pretty Miss Fitzalan Courtney, of the Bombay Fencibles, who
is as white as an Italian princess--is called an "Eurasian."

"Do you know, dear Vanity, that it is not impossible that King Asoka
(of the Edict Pillars), the 'Constantine of Buddhism,' was an
Eurasian? I have not got the works of Arrian, or Mr. Lethbridge's
'History of the World' at hand, but I have some recollection of
Sandracottus, or one of Asoka's fathers or grandfathers, marrying a
Miss Megasthenes, or Seleucus. With such memories no wonder they call
us 'Mean Whites.'"--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XIV



THE VILLAGER

      "Venio nunc ad voluptates agricolarum, quibus ego" (like the
      Famine Commissioners) "incredibiliter delector."


[November 8, 1879.]

I missed two people at the Delhi Assemblage 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, _ça-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 assumption that _writing maketh a full
man_--that to write over a certain area of paper will fill the
collapsed cuticles of the agricultural class throughout India.

When [Sir Richard Temple] first started the idea of holding famines, I
proposed that he should illustrate 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 constitutional 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 sunshine 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 leafage 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 peacock, with furled glories, on the temple tower of
the silent gods. Amid this easeful and luscious splendour the villager
labours and starves.

Reams of hiccoughing platitudes 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 chuprassies, 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. God 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
worshippers, the peasant is a priest. There he offers up his hopes and
fears for rain and sunshine; 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 God 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 grass. The
egret has resumed his fishing 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
shifting 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 institutions, but
none the less a perfect, living entity. 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 nobis ante oculos est
      Qui petere a populo fasces sævasque 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 petit 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



[Illustration: 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 shore,
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 buttons 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 Padré, 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 cocked-hats
at head-quarters. He knows that to maintain an air of activity they
must still be changing something or abolishing 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 abolishing the old Colonel, this too presents
its difficulties, for Sir Norman Henry and all the celebrated
cocked-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 brass scabbard, that he may stand up on high
ceremonials and drink the health of the good Queen for whom he has
lived bravely through sunshine 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 passed away, and his little
improprieties are such as might illustrate 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 circumambient 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."



[November 22, 1879.]

Perhaps you would hardly guess from his appearance and ways that he
was a surgeon and a medicine-man. He certainly does not smell of
lavender or peppermint, or display fine and curious linen, or tread
softly like a cat. Contrariwise.

He smells of tobacco, and wears flannel underclothing. His step is
heavy. He is a gross, big cow-buffalo sort of man, with a tangled
growth of beard. His ranting voice and loud familiar manner amount to
an outrage. He laughs like a camel, with deep bubbling noises. Thick
corduroy breeches and gaiters swaddle his shapeless legs, and he rides
a coarse-bred Waler mare.

I pray the gods that he may never be required to operate upon my eyes,
or intestines, or any other delicate organ--that he may never be
required to trephine my skull, or remove the roof of my mouth.

Of course he is a very good fellow. He walks straight into your
drawing-room with a pipe in his mouth, bellowing out your name. No
servant announces his arrival. He tramples in and crushes himself into
a chair, without removing his hat, or performing any other high
ceremonial. He has been riding in the sun, and is in a state of
profuse perspiration; you will have to bring him round with the
national beverage of Anglo-India, a brandy-and-soda.

Now he will enter upon your case. "Well, you're looking very blooming;
what the devil is the matter with you? Eh? Eh? Want a trip to the
hills? Eh? Eh? How is the bay pony? Eh? Have you seen Smith's new
filly? Eh?"

This is very cheerful and reassuring if you are a healthy man with
some large conspicuous disease--a broken rib, cholera, or toothache;
but if you are a fine, delicately-made man, pregnant with poetry as
the egg of the nightingale is pregnant with music, and throbbing with
an exquisite nervous sensibility, perhaps languishing under some vague
and occult disease, of which you are only conscious in moments of
intense introspection, this mode of approaching the diagnosis is apt
to give your system a shock.

Otherwise it may be bracing, like the inclement north wind. But,
speaking for myself, it has proved most ruinous and disastrous. Since
I have known the Doctor my constitution has broken up. I am a wreck.
There is hardly a single drug in the whole pharmacopoeia that I can
take with any pleasure, and I have entirely lost sight of a most
interesting and curious complaint.

You see, dear Vanity, that I don't mince matters. I take our Doctor as
I find him, rough and allopathic; but I am sure he might be improved
in the course of two or three generations. We may leave this, however,
to Nature and the Army Medical Department. Reform is not my business.
I have no proposals to offer that will accelerate the progress of the
Doctor towards a higher type.

Happily his surgical and medicinal functions claim only a portion of
his time. He is in charge of the district gaol, a large and
comfortable retreat for criminals. Here he is admirable. To some eight
or nine hundred murderers, robbers, and inferior delinquents he plays
the part of _maître d'hôtel_ with infinite success. In the whole
country side you will not find a community so well bathed, dressed,
exercised, fed and lodged as that over which the Doctor presides. You
observe on every face a quiet, Quakerish air of contentment. Every
inmate of the gaol seems to think that he has now found a haven of
rest.

      If the sea-horse on the ocean
        Own no dear domestic cave,
      Yet he slumbers without motion
        On the still and halcyon wave;
      If on rainy days the loafer
        Gamble when he cannot roam,
      The police will help him so far
        As to find him here a home.

This is indeed a quiet refuge for world-wearied men; a sanctuary
undisturbed by the fears of the weak or the passions of the strong.
All reasonable wants are gratified here; nothing is hoped for any
more. The poor burglar burdened with unsaleable "grab" and the
reproaches of a venal world sorrowfully seeks an asylum here. He
brings nothing in his hand; he seeks nothing but rest. He whispers
through the key-hole--


              Nil cupientium
      Nudus castra peto.

Look at this prisoner slumbering peacefully beside his _huqqa_ under
the suggestive bottle tree (there is something touching in his
selecting the shade of a _bottle_ tree: Horace clearly had no _bottle_
tree; or he would never have lain under a strawberry (and cream)
tree). You can see that he has been softly nurtured. What a sleek,
sturdy fellow he is! He is a covenanted servant here, having passed an
examination in gang robbery accompanied by violence and prevarication.
He cannot be discharged under a long term of years. Uncovenanted
pilferers, in for a week, regard him with respect and envy. And
certainly his lot is enviable; he has no cares, no anxieties. Famine
and the depreciation of silver are nothing to him. Rain or sunshine,
he lives in plenty. His days are spent in an innocent round of duties,
relieved by sleep and contemplation of [Greek: to on]. In the long
heats of summer he whiles away the time with carpet-making; between
the showers of autumn he digs, like our first parents, in the Doctor's
garden; and in winter, as there is no billiard-table, he takes a turn
on the treadmill with his mates. Perhaps, as he does so, he recites
Charles Lamb's Pindaric ode:--

                             Great mill!
      That by thy motion proper
      (No thanks to wind or sail, or toiling rill)
      Grinding that stubborn-corn, the human will,
      Turn'st out men's consciences,
      That were begrimed before, as clean and sweet
      As flour from purest wheat,
      Into thy hopper.

Yet sometimes a murmur rises like a summer zephyr even from the soft
lap of luxury and ease. Even the hardened criminal, dandled on the
knee of a patriarchal Government, will sometimes complain and try to
give the Doctor trouble. But the Doctor has a specific--a brief
incantation that allays every species of inflammatory discontent.
"Look here, my man! If I hear any more of this infernal nonsense, I'll
turn you out of the gaol neck and crop." This is a threat that never
fails to produce the desired effect. To be expelled from gaol and
driven, like Cain, into the rude and wicked world, a wanderer, an
outcast--this would indeed be a cruel ban. Before such a presentiment
the well-ordered mind of the criminal recoils with horror.

The Civil Surgeon is also a rain doctor, and takes charge of the
Imperial gauge. If a pint more or a pint less than usual falls, he at
once telegraphs this priceless gossip to the Press Commissioner,
Oracle Grotto, Delphi, Elysium. This is one of our precautions to
guard against famine. Mr. Caird is the other.

[I was once in a very small station where our Civil Surgeon was an
Eurasian. He was a pompous little fellow, but a capital doctor,
gaoler, and metereologist.

      "Omnis Aristippum decint, color et status, et res."

We liked him so much that we all got ill; crime increased, the gaol
filled, and no one ever passed the rain-gauge without either emptying
it or pouring in a brandy-and-soda. With women and children he was a
great favourite; for he had not become brutalised by familiarity with
suffering in hospitals. His heart was still tender, his voice soft,
and he had a gentle way with his hands. I never knew anyone who was so
unwilling to inflict pain; yet he was not unnerved when it had to be
done. But, poor little physician! he was not able to cure himself when
fever laid her hot hand on him. He tried to go on with his work and
live it down; but the recuperative forces of Nature were weak within
him, and he died. "The good die first, and those whose hearts are dry
as summer dust burn to the socket." Our cow-buffalo doctor is still
alive, I fear.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XVII



THE SHIKARRY



[November 29, 1879.]

I have come out to spend a day in the jungle with him, to see him play
on his own stage. His little flock of white tents has flown many a
march to meet me, and have now alighted at this accessible spot near a
poor hamlet on the verge of cultivation. I feel that I have only to
yield myself for a few days to its hospitable importunities and it
will waft me away to profound forest depths, to the awful penetralia
of the bison and the tiger. Even here everything is strange to me; the
common native has become a Bheel, the sparrowhawk an eagle, the grass
of the field a vast, reedy growth in which an elephant becomes a mere
field mouse. Out of the leaves come strange bird-notes, a strange
silence broods over us; it is broken by strange rustlings and cries;
it closes over us again strangely. Nature swoons in its glory of
sunshine and weird music; it has put forth its powers in colossal
timber and howling beasts of prey; it faints amid little wild flowers,
fanned by breezes and butterflies.

My heart beats in strange anapæsts. This dream world of leaf and bird
stirs the blood with a strange enchantment. The Spirit of Nature
touches us with her caduceus:--

      Fair are others, none behold thee;
      But thy voice sounds low and tender
      Like the fairest, for it folds thee
      From the sight, that liquid splendour;
      And all feel, yet see thee never,
      As I feel now ....

Our tents are played upon by the flickering shadows of the vast
pipal-tree that rises in a laocoön tortuosity of roots out of an old
well. The spot is cool and pleasant. Round us are picketed elephants,
camels, bullocks, and horses, all enjoying the shade. Our servants are
cooking their food on the precincts; each is busy in front of his own
little mud fireplace. On a larger altar greater sacrifices are being
offered up for our breakfast. A crowd of nearly naked Bheels watch the
rites and snuff the fragrant incense of venison from a respectable
distance. Their leader, a broken-looking old man, with hardly a rag
on, stands apart exchanging deep confidences with my friend the
Shikarry. This old Bheel is girt about the loins with knives, pouches,
powder-horns, and ramrods; and he carries on his shoulder an aged
flintlock. He looks old enough to be an English General Officer or a
Cabinet Minister; and you might assume that he was in the last stage
of physical and mental decay. But you would be quite wrong. This old
Bheel will sit up all night on the branch of a tree among the horned
owls; he will see the tiger kill the young buffalo tied up as a bait
beneath; he will see it drink the life-blood and tear the haunch; he
will watch it steal away and hide under the _karaunda_ bush; he will
sit there till day breaks, when he will creep under the thorn jungle,
across the stream, up the scarp of the ravine, through the long grass
to the sahib's camp, and give the word that makes the hunter's heart
dance. From the camp he will stride from hamlet to hamlet till he has
raised an army of beaters; and he will be back at the camp with his
forces before the sahib has breakfasted. Through the long heats of the
day he will be the life and soul of the hunt, urging on the beaters
with voice and example, climbing trees, peeping under bushes, carrying
orders, giving advice, changing the line, until that supreme moment
when shots are fired, when the rasping growl tells that the shots have
taken effect, and when at length the huge cat lies stretched out dead.
And all this on a handful of parched grain!

                    [Is this nothing?
      Why then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing;
      The covering sky is nothing, Ali Baba's nothing.]

My friend the Shikarry delights to clothe himself in the coarse
fabrics manufactured in gaol, which, when properly patched and
decorated with pockets, have undoubtedly a certain wild-wood
appearance.

As the hunter does not happen to be a Bheel with the privileges of
nakedness conferred by a brown skin, this is perhaps the only
practical alternative. If he went out to shoot in evening clothes, a
crush hat, and a hansom cab, the chances are that he would make an
example of himself and come to some untimely end. What would the
Apollo Bundar say? What would the Bengali Baboo say? What would the
sea-aye-ees say? Yes, our hunter affects coarse and snuffy clothes;
they carry with them suggestions of hardship and roughing it; and his
hat is umbrageous and old.

As to the man under the hat, he is an odd compound of vanity,
sentiment, and generosity. He is as affected as a girl. Among other
traits he affects reticence, and he will not tell me what the plans
for the day are, or what _khabbar_[W] has been received. Knowing
absolutely nothing, he moves about with a solemn and important air,
[as if six months gone with a _bandobast_[X]]; and he says to me,
"Don't fret yourself my dear fellow; you'll know all about it time
enough. I have made arrangements." Then he dissembles and talks of
irrelevant topics transcendentally. This makes me feel such a poor
pen-and-ink fellow, such a worm, such a [Famine-commissioner, such a]
Political Agent!

With this discordant note still vibrating we go in to breakfast; and
then, dear Vanity, he _bucks_ with a quiet, stubborn determination
that would fill an American editor or an Under-Secretary of State with
despair. [His lies are really that awful (as the Press Commissioner
would say) which you couldn't tell as what he was joking, or
inebriated, or drawing your leg.] He belongs to the twelve-foot-tiger
school; so, perhaps, he can't help it.

If the whole truth were told, he is a warm-hearted, generous, plucky
fellow, with boundless vanity and a romantic vein of maudlin sentiment
that seduces him from time to time into the gin-and-water corner of an
Indian newspaper. Under the heading of "The Forest Ranger's Lament,"
or "The Old Shikarry's Tale of Woe," he hiccoughs his column of sickly
lines (with St. Vitus's dance in their feet), and then I believe he
feels better. I have seen him do it; I have caught him in criminal
conversation with a pen and a sheet of paper; bottle at hand--

        A quo, ceu fonte perenni,
      Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.

In appearance he is a very short man with a long black beard, a
sunburnt face, and a clay pipe. He has shot battalions of tigers and
speared squadrons of wild pig. He is universally loved, universally
admired, and universally laughed at.

He is generous to a fault. All the young fellows for miles round owe
him money. He would think there was something wrong if they did not
borrow from him; and yet, somehow, I don't think that he is very well
off. There is nothing in his bungalow but guns, spears, and hunting
trophies; he never goes home, and I have an idea that there is some
heavy drain on his purse in the old country. But you should hear him
troll a hunting song with his grand organ voice, and you would fancy
him the richest man in the world, his note is so high and triumphant!

      So when in after days we boast
        Of many wild boars slain,
      We'll not forget our runs to toast
        Or run them o'er again;

      And when our memory's mirror true
        Reflects the scenes of yore,
      We'll think of _him_ it brings to view,
        Who loved to hunt the boar.

                                     ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XVIII



THE GRASS-WIDOW IN NEPHELOCOCCYGIA



[Illustration: THE GRASS WIDOW--"Sweet little Mrs. Lollipop."]



Her bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne?



[December 6, 1879]

Little Mrs. Lollipop has certainly proved a source of disappointment
to her lady friends. They have watched her for three seasons going
lightly and merrily through all the gaieties of Cloudland; they have
listened to the scandal of the cuckoos among the pine-trees and
rhododendrons, but they have not caught her tripping. Oh, no, they
will never catch her tripping. She does not trip for their amusement:
perhaps she trips it when they go on the light fantastic toe, but
there is no evidence; there is only a zephyr of conjecture, only the
world's low whisper not yet broken into storm--not yet.

Yes, she is a source of disappointment to them. They have noted her
points; her beauty has burned itself into their jealousy; her merry
laugh has fanned their scorn; her bountiful presence is an affront to
them, as is her ripe and lissom figure. They pronounce her morally
unsound; they say her nature has a taint; they chill her popularity
with silent smiles of slow disparagement. But they have no
particulars; their slander is not concrete. It is an amorphous
accusation, sweeping and vague, spleen-born and proofless.

She certainly knows how to dress. Her weeds sit easily and smoothly on
their delightful mould. You might think of her as a sweet, warm statue
painted in water-colours. (Who wouldn't be her Pygmalion?) If she adds
a garment it is an improvement; if she removes a garment it is an
improvement; if she dresses her hair it is better; if she lets it fall
in a brown cascade over her white shoulders it is still better; when
it is yet in curl-papers it is charming. If you smudge the tip of her
nose with a burnt cork the effect is irresistible; if you stick a
flower in her hair it is a fancy dress, a complete costume--she
becomes Flora, Aurora, anything you like to name. Yet I have never
clothed her in a flower, I have never smudged her nose with a burnt
cork, I have never uncurled her hair. Ali Baba's character must not go
drifting down the stream of gossip with the Hill Captains and the
Under-Secretaries. But I hope that this does not destroy the argument.
The argument is that she is quite too delightful, and therefore blown
upon by poisonous whispers.

Her bungalow is an Elysium, of course; it is a cottage with a
verandah, built on a steep slope, and buried deep in shrubbery and
trees. Within all is plain, but exquisitely neat. A wood fire is
burning gaily, and the kindly tea-tray is at hand. It is five o'clock.
Clean servants move silently about with hot water, cake, &c. The
little boy, a hostage from papa in the warm plains below, is sitting
pensive, after the fashion of Anglo-Indian children, in a little
chair. His bearer crouches behind him. The unspeakable widow, in a
tea-gown dimly splendid with tropical vegetation in neutral tints,
holds a piece of chocolate in her hand, while she leans back in her
fauteuil convulsed with laughter. (It is not necessary to say that Ali
Baba is relating one of his improving tales.) How pretty she looks,
showing her excellent teeth and suffused with bright warm blushes,
[which, I beg leave to explain, proceed from drinking hot tea and
indulging in immoderate laughter, not from listening to A.B.'s
improving tales!] As I gaze upon her with fond amazement, I murmur
mechanically:--

      Mine be a cot beside the hill;
        A tea-pot's hum shall soothe my ear,
      A widowy girl, that likes me still,
        With many a smile shall linger near.

I have been asked to write a philosophical minute on the mental and
moral condition of delightful Mrs. Lollipop's husband, who lives down
in the plains. I have been requested by the Press Commissioner to
inquire in Government fashion, with pen and ink, as to whether the
complaisant proprietor of so many charms desires to have a recheat
winded in his forehead, and to hang his bugle in an invisible
baldrick; whether it is true in his case that Love's ear will hear the
lowest cuckoo note, and that Love's perception of gossip is more soft
and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Towards all
these points I have directed my researches. I have resolved myself
into a Special Commission, and I have sat upon grass-widowers _in
camera_. If I sit a little longer a Report will be hatched, which, of
course, I shall take to England, and when there I shall go to the
places of amusement with the Famine Commission, and have rather a good
time of it. Already I can see, with that bright internal eye which
requires no limelight, grim Famine stalking about the Aquarium after
dinner with a merry jest preening its wings on his lips.

But what has all this talk of country matters to do with little Mrs.
Lollipop? Absolutely nothing. She thinks no ill of herself. She is the
most charitable woman in the world. There is no veil of sin over her
eye; no cloud of suspicion darkens her forehead; no concealment feeds
upon her damask cheek. Like Eve she goes about hand in hand with her
friends, in native innocence, relying on what she has of virtue. Sweet
simplicity! sweet confidence! My eagle quill shall not flutter these
doves.

Have you ever watched her at a big dance? She takes possession of some
large warrior who has lately arrived from the battle-fields of Umballa
or Meerut, and she chaperones him about the rooms, staying him with
flagons and prattling low nothings. The weaker vessel jibs a little at
first; but gradually the spell begins to work and the love-light
kindles in his eye. He dances, he makes a joke, he tells a story, he
turns round and looks her in the face. He is lost. That big centurion
is a casualty; and no one pities him. "How can he go on like that,
odious creature!" say the withered wall-flowers, and the Hill Captains
fume round, working out formulae to express his baseness. But he is
away on the glorious mountains of vanity; the intoxicating atmosphere
makes life tingle in his blood; he is an [Greek: aerobataes], he no
longer treads the earth. In a few days Mrs. Lollipop will receive a
post-card from the Colonel of her centurion's regiment.

MY DEAR MRS.

      Lollipop, dic, per omnes
      Te deos oro, Robinson cur properes amando
      Perdere? cur apricum
      Oderit campum, patiens pulveris atque solis.

      Yrs. Sincy.

                     HORACE FITZDOTTREL.

Ten to one an Archdeacon will be sent for to translate this. Ten to
one there is a shindy, ending in tea and tearful smiles; for she is
bound to get a blowing up.

After what I have written I suppose it would be superfluous to affirm
with oaths my irrefragable belief in Mrs. Lollipop's innocence; it
would be superfluous to deprecate the many-winged slanders that wound
this milk-white hind. If, however, by swearing, any of your readers
think I can be of service to her character, I hope they will let me
know. I have learnt a few oaths lately that I reckon will unsphere
some of the scandal-mongers of Nephelococcygia. I had my ear one
morning at the keyhole when the Army Commission was revising the
cursing and swearing code for field service.--(Ah! these dear old
Generals, what depths of simplicity they disclose when they get by
themselves! I sometimes think that if I had my life to live over again
I would keep a newspaper and become a really great General. I know
some five or six obscure aboriginal tribes that have never yet yielded
a single war or a single K.C.B.)

But this is a digression. I was maintaining the goodness of Mrs.
Lollipop--little Mrs. Lollipop! sweet little Mrs. Lollipop! I was
going to say that she was far too good to be made the subject of
whisperings and innuendoes. Her virtue is of such a robust type that
even a Divorce Court would sink back abashed before it, like a guilty
thing surprised. Indeed, she often reminds me of Cæsar's wife.

The harpies of scandal protest that she dresses too low; that she
exposes too freely the well-rounded charms of her black silk
stockings; that she appears at fancy-dress balls picturesquely
unclothed--in a word, that the public sees a little too much of little
Mrs. Lollipop; and that, in conversation with men, she nibbles at the
forbidden apples of thought. But all this proves her innocence,
surely. She fears no danger, for she knows no sin. She cannot
understand why she should hide anything from an admiring world. Why
keep her charms concealed from mortal eye, like roses that in deserts
bloom and die? She often reminds me of Una in Hypocrisy's cell.

I heard an old Gorgon ask one of Mrs. Lollipop's _clientèle_ the other
day whether he would like to be Mrs. Lollipop's husband. "No," he
said, "not her husband; I am not worthy to be her husband--

      "But I would be the necklace
      And all day long to fall and rise
      Upon her balmy bosom
      With her laughter or her sighs;
      And I would lie so light, so light,
      I scarce should be unclasped at night."

That old Gorgon is now going through a course of hysterics under
medical and clerical advice. Her ears are in as bad a case as Lady
Macbeth's hands. Hymns will not purge them.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XIX



THE TRAVELLING M.P.



THE BRITISH LION RAMPANT



[December 13, 1879.]

There is not a more fearful wild fowl than your travelling M.P. This
unhappy creature, whose mind is a perfect blank regarding
_Faujdari_[Y] and _Bandobast_,[Z] and who cannot distinguish the
molluscous Baboo from the osseous Pathan, will actually presume to
discuss Indian subjects with you, unless strict precautions be taken.

When I meet one of these loose M.P.'s ramping about I always cut his
claws at once. I say, "Now, Mr. T.G., you must understand that,
according to my standard, you are a homunculus of the lowest type.
There is nothing I value a man for that you can do; there is nothing I
consider worth directing the human mind upon that you know. If you ask
for any information which I may deem it expedient to give to a person
in your unfortunate position, well and good; but if you venture to
argue with me, to express any opinion, to criticise anything I may be
good enough to say regarding India, or to quote any passage relating
to Asia from the works of Burke, Cowper, Bright, or Fawcett, I will
hand you over to Major Henderson for strangulation, I will cause your
body to be burnt by an Imperial Commission of sweepers, and I will
mention your name in the _Pioneer_."

In dangerous cases, where a note-book is carried, your loose M.P. must
be made to reside within the pale of guarded conversation. If you are
wise you will speak to him in the interrogative mood exclusively; and
you will treat his answers with contumelious laughter or disdainful
silence.

About a week after your M.P. has landed in India he will begin his
great work on the history, literature, philosophy and social
institutions of the Hindoos. You will see him in a railway carriage
when stirred by the [Greek: oistros] studying Forbes's Hindustani
Manual. He is undoubtedly writing the chapter on the philology of the
Aryan Family. Do you observe the fine frenzy that kindles behind his
spectacles as he leans back and tries to eject a root? These pangs are
worth about half-a-crown an hour in the present state of the book
market. One cannot contemplate them without profound emotion.

The reading world is hunger-bitten about Asia, and I often think I
shall take three months' leave and run up a _précis_ of Sanskrit and
Pali literature, just a few folios for the learned world. Max Müller
begs me to learn these languages first; but this would be a toil and
drudgery, whereas to me the pursuit of literary excellence and fame is
a mere amusement, like lawn-tennis or rinking. It is the fault of the
age to make a labour of what is meant to be a pastime.

      Telle est de nos plaisirs la surface légère;
      Glissez, mortels, n'appuyez pas.

The travelling M.P. will probably come to you with a letter of
introduction from the last station he has visited, and he will
immediately proceed to make himself quite at home in your bungalow
with the easy manners of the Briton abroad. He will acquaint you with
his plans and name the places of interest in the neighbourhood which
he requires you to show him. He will ask you to take him, as a
preliminary canter, to the gaol and lunatic asylum; and he will make
many interesting suggestions to the civil surgeon as to the management
of these institutions, comparing them unfavourably with those he has
visited in other stations. He will then inspect the Brigadier-General
commanding the station, the chaplain, and the missionaries. On his
return--when he ought to be bathing--he will probably write his
article for the _Twentieth Century_, entitled "Is India Worth
Keeping?" And this ridiculous old Shrovetide cock, whose ignorance and
information leave two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned
loose upon the reading public! Upon my word, I believe the reading
public would do better to go and sit at the feet of Baboo Sillabub
Thunder Gosht, B.A.

What is it that these travelling people put on paper? Let me put it in
the form of a conundrum. _Q._ What is it that the travelling M.P.
treasures up and the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? _A._
Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the
griffin, India steams up in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic,
subjective, ideal, picturesque. The adult _Qui Hai_ attains to prose,
to stern and disappointing realities; he removes the gilt from the
Empire and penetrates to the brown ginger-bread of Rajas and Baboos.
One of the most serious duties attending a residence in India is the
correcting of those misapprehensions which your travelling M.P.
sacrifices his bath to hustle upon paper. The spectacled people
embalmed in secretariats alone among Anglo-Indians continue to see the
gay visions of griffinhood. They alone preserve the phantasmagoria of
bookland and dreamland. As for the rest of us:--

      Out of the day and night
      A joy has taken flight:
      Baboos and Rajas and Indian lore
      Move our faint hearts with grief, but with delight
      No more--oh, never more!

It is strange that one who is modest and inoffensive in his own
country should immediately on leaving it exhibit some of the worst
features of Arryism; but it seems inevitable. I have met in this
unhappy land, countrymen (who are gentlemen in England, Members of
Parliament, and Deputy Lieutenants, and that kind of thing) whose
conduct and demeanour while here I can never recall without tears and
blushes for our common humanity. My friends witnessing this emotion
often suppose that I am thinking of the Famine Commission.

[I am an Anglo-Indian cherishing many a burning Anglo-Indian
prejudice, and I should be sorry if from what I have written here it
does not sufficiently appear that I cherish a burning prejudice
against the British Tourist in India, who comes out to get up India
and to do India; not against the tourist who comes out to shoot or to
play the fool in a quiet unostentatious way.]

As far as I can learn, it is a generally received opinion at home that
a man who has seen the Taj at Agra, the Qutb at Delhi, and the Duke at
Madras, has graduated with honours in all questions connected with
British interests in Asia; and is only unfitted for the office of
Governor-General of India from knowing too much.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XX



MEM-SAHIB



      "Her life is lone. He sits apart;
        He loves her yet: she will not weep,
        Tho' rapt in matters dark and deep
      He seems to slight her simple heart.

      "For him she plays, to him she sings
        Of early faith and plighted vows;
        She knows but matters of the house,
      And he, he knows a thousand things."

[December 20, 1879.]

I first met her shepherding her little flock across the ocean. She was
a beautiful woman, in the full sweetness and bloom of life. [The
mystery of early wifehood and motherhood gave a pensiveness to her
soft eyes; but her voice and manner disclosed the cheerful confidence
of perfect health and a pure heart.] Her talk was of the busy husband
she had left, the station life, the attached servants, the favourite
horse, the garden, and the bungalow. Her husband would soon follow
her, in a year, or two years, and they would return together; but they
would return to a silent home--the children would be left behind. She
was going home to her mother and sisters; but there had been changes
in this home. So her thoughts were woven of hopes and fears; and, as
she sat on deck of an evening, with the great heart of the moon-lit
sea palpitating around us, and the homeless night-wind sighing through
the cordage, she would sing to us one of the plaintive ballads of the
old country, till we forgot to listen to the sobbing and the trampling
of the engines, and till all sights and sounds resolved themselves
into a temple of sentiment round a charming priestess chanting low
anthems. She would leave us early to go to her babies. She would leave
us throbbing with mock heroics, undecided whether we should cry, or
consecrate our lives to some high and noble enterprise, or drink one
more glass of hot whiskey-and-water. She was kind, but not
sentimental; her sweet, yet practical "good-night" was quite of the
work-a-day world; we felt that it tended to dispel illusions.

She had three little boys, who were turned out three times a day in
the ultimate state of good behaviour, tidiness, and cleanliness, and
who lapsed three times a day into a state of original sin combined
with tar and ship's grease. These three little boys pervaded the
vessel with an innocent smile on their three little faces, their
mother's winning smile. Every man on the ship was their own familiar
friend, bound to them by little interchanges of biscuits, confidences,
twine, and by that electric smile which their mother communicated, and
from which no one wished to be insulated. Yes, they quite pervaded the
vessel, these three little innocents, flying that bright and friendly
smile; and there was no description of mischief suitable for three
very little boys that they did not exhaust. The ingenuity they
squandered every day in doing a hundred things which they ought not to
have done was perfectly marvellous. Before the voyage was half over we
thought there was nothing left for them to do; but we were entirely
mistaken. The daily round, a common cask would furnish all they had to
ask; to them the meanest whistle that blows, or a pocket-knife, could
give thoughts that too often led to smiles and tears.

Their mother's thoughts were ever with them; but she was like a hen
with a brood of ducklings. They passed out of her element, and only
returned as hunger called them. When they did return she was all that
soap and water, loving reproaches, and tender appeals could be; and as
they were very affectionate little boys, they were for the time
thoroughly cleansed morally and physically, and sealed with the
absolution of kisses.

I saw her three years afterwards in England. She was living in
lodgings near a school which her boys attended. She looked careworn.
Her relations had been kind to her, but not warmly affectionate. She
had been disappointed with the welcome they had given her. They seemed
changed to her, more formal, narrower, colder. She longed to be back
in India; to be with her husband once more. But he was engrossed with
his work. He wrote short letters enclosing cheques; but he never said
that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, that she must
come out to him, or that he must go to her. He could not have grown
cold too? No, he was busy; he had never been demonstrative in his
affection; this was his way. And she was anxious about the boys. She
did not know whether they were really getting on, whether she was
doing the best for them, whether their father would be satisfied. She
had no friends near her, no one to speak to; so she brooded over these
problems, exaggerated them, and fretted.

The husband was a man who lived in his own thoughts, and his thoughts
were book thoughts. The world of leaf and bird, the circumambient
firmament of music and light, shone in upon him through books. A book
was the master key that unlocked all his senses, that unfolded the
varied landscape, animated the hero, painted the flower, swelled the
orchestra of wind and ocean, peopled the plains of India with
starvelings and the mountains of Afghanistan with cut-throats. Without
a book he moved about like a shadow lost in some dim dreamland of
echoes.

Everyone knew he was a scholar, and his thoughts had once or twice
rung out to the world clear and loud as a trumpet-note through the
oracles of the Press. But in society he was shy, awkward, and uncouth
of speech, quite unable to marshal his thoughts, deserted by his
memory, abashed before his own silences, and startled by his own
words. Any fool who could talk about the legs of a horse or the height
of the thermometer was Prospero to this social Caliban.

He felt that before the fine instincts of women his infirmity was
especially conspicuous, and he drifted into misogyny through
bashfulness and pride; and yet misogyny was incompatible with his
scheme of life and his ambition. He felt himself to be worthy of the
full diapason of home life; he desired to be as other men were,
besides being something more.

      [Greek: Kakon gynaikes all' homos, o daemotai,
     Ouk estin oikein oikian aneu kakou.
      Kai gar to gaemai, kai to mae gaemai, kakon.]

So he married her who loved him for choosing her, and who reverenced
him for his mysterious treasures of thought.

There was much in his life that she could never share: but he longed
for companionship in thought, and for the first year of their married
life he tried to introduce her to his world. He led her slowly up to
the quiet hill-tops of thought where the air is still and clear, and
he gave her to drink of the magic fountains of music. Their hearts
beat one delicious measure. Her gentle nature was plastic under the
poet's touch, wrought in an instant to perfect harmony with love, or
tears, or laughter. To read aloud to her in the evening after the
day's work was over, and to see her stirred by every breath of the
thought-storm, was to enjoy an exquisite interpretation of the poet's
motive, like an impression bold and sharp from the matrix of the
poet's mind. This was to hear the song of the poet and Nature's low
echo. How tranquilising it was! How it effaced the petty vexations of
the day!--"softening and concealing; and busy with a hand of healing."

      Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta,
      Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per æstum
      Dulcis aquæ saliente sitim restinguere rivo.

But with the advent of babies poetry declined, and the sympathetic
wife became more and more motherly. The father retired sadly into the
dreamland of books. He will not emerge again. Husband and wife will
stand upon the clear hill-tops together no more.

Neither quite knows what has happened; they both feel changed with an
undefined sorrow, with a regret that pride will not enunciate. She is
now again in India with her husband. There are duties, courtesies,
nay, kindnesses which both will perform, but the ghost of love and
sympathy will only rise in their hearts to jibber in mockery words and
phrases that have lost their meaning, that have lost their
enchantment.

      "O love! who bewailest
        The frailty of all things here,
      Why choose you the frailest
        For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

      "Its passions will rock thee
        As the storms rock the raven on high;
      Bright reason will mock thee
        Like the sun from a wintry sky.

      "From thy nest every rafter
        Will rot, and thine eagle home
      Leave thee naked to laughter
        When leaves fall and cold winds come."

                                              ALI BABA, K.C.B.




No. XXI



ALI BABA ALONE



THE LAST DAY



      "Now the last of many days,
        All beautiful and bright as thou,
        The loveliest, and the last is dead,
      Rise, memory, and write its praise."



[December 27, 1879.]

How shall I lay this spectre of my own identity? Shall I leave it to
melt away gracefully in the light of setting suns? It would never do
to put it out like a farthing rushlight after it had haunted the Great
Ornamental in an aurora of smiles. Is Ali Baba to cease upon the
midnight without pain? or is he to lie down like a tired child and
weep out the spark? or should he just flit to Elysium? There, seated
on Elysian lawns, browsed by none but Dian's (no allusion to little
Mrs. Lollipop) fawns, amid the noise of fountains wonderous and the
parle of voices thunderous, some wag might scribble on his door, "Here
lies Ali Baba"--as if glancing at his truthfulness. How is he to pass
effectively into the golden silences? How is he to relapse into the
still-world of observation? Would four thousand five hundred a month
and Simla do it, with nothing to do and allowances, and a seat beside
those littered under the swart Dog-Star of India? Or is it to be the
mandragora of pension, that he may sleep out the great gap of _ennui_
between this life and something better? How lonely the Government of
India would feel! How the world would forget the Government of India!
Voices would ask:--

      Do ye sit there still in slumber
        In gigantic Alpine rows?
      The black poppies out of number
        Nodding, dripping from your brows
      To the red lees of your wine--
      And so kept alive and fine.

Sometimes I think that Ali Baba should be satisfied with the
oblivion-mantle of knighthood and relapse into dingy respectability in
the Avilion of Brompton or Bath; but since he has taken to wearing
stars the accompanying itch for blood and fame has come:--

      How doth the greedy K.C.B.
        Delight to brag and fight,
      And gather medals all the day
        And wear them all the night.

The fear of being out-medalled and out-starred stings him:--

      [Consimili ratione ab eodem sæpe timore
      Macerat invidia, ante oculos ilium esse polentem,
      Illum aspectari, claro qui incedit honore,
      Ipsi se in tenebris volvi cænoque queruntur
      Insereunt partim statuarum et nominis ergo.]

Thus the desire to go hustling up the hill to the Temple of Fame with
the other starry hosts impels him forward. If you mix yourself up with
K.C.B.'s and raise your platform of ambition, you are just where you
were at the A B C of your career. Living on a table-land, you
experience no sensation of height. For the intoxicating delights of
elevation you require a solitary pinnacle, some lonely eminence. Aut
Cæsar, aut nullus; whether in the zenith or the Nadir of the world's
favour.

But how much more comfortable in the cold season than the chill
splendours of the pinnacles of fame, where "pale suns unfelt at
distance roll away," is a comfortable bungalow on the plains, with a
little mulled claret after dinner. Here I think Ali Baba will be
found, hidden from his creditors, the reading world, in the warm light
of thought, singing songs unbidden till a few select cronies are
wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears they heeded not--before the
mulled claret.

To this symposium the A.-D.-C.-in-Waiting has invited himself on
behalf of the Empire. He will sing the Imperial Anthem composed by Mr.
Eastwick, and it will be translated into archaic Persian by an
imperial Munshi for the benefit of the Man in Buckram, who will be
present. The Man in Buckram, who is suffering from a cold in his
heart, will be wrapped up in himself and a cocked hat. The Press
Commissioner has also asked for an invitation. He will deliver a
sentiment:--"Quid sit futurum eras fuge quærere." A Commander-in-Chief
will tell the old story about the Service going to the dogs; after
which there will be an interval of ten minutes allowed for swearing
and hiccuping. The Travelling M.P. will take the opportunity to jot
down a few hasty notes on Aryan characteristics for the _Twentieth
Century_ before being placed under the table. The Baboo will
subsequently be told off to sit on the Member's head. During this
function the Baboo will deliver some sesquipedalian reflections in the
rodomontade mood. The Shikarry will then tell the twelve-foot-tiger
story. Mrs. Lollipop will tell a fib and make tea; and Ali Baba
(unless his heart is too full of mulled claret) will make a joke. The
company will break up at this point, after receiving a plenary
dispensation from the Archdeacon.

Under such influences Ali Baba may become serious; he may learn from
the wisdom of age and be cheered by the sallies of youth. But little
Mrs. Lollipop can hardly be called one of the Sallies of his youth.
Sally Lollipop rose upon the horizon of his middle age. She boiled up,
pure blanc-mange and roses, over the dark brim of life's afternoon, a
blushing sunrise, though late to rise, and most cheerful. Sometimes
after spending an afternoon with her, Ali Baba feels so cheered that
the Government of India seems quite innocent and bright, like an old
ballerina seen through the mists of champagne and limelight. He walks
down the Mall smiling upon foolish Under Secretaries and fat Baboos.
The people whisper as he passes, "There goes Ali Baba"; and echo
answers "Who is Ali Baba?" Then a little wind of conjecture breathes
through the pine-trees and names are heard.

It is better not to call Ali Baba names. Nothing is so misleading as a
vulgar nomenclature. I once knew a man who was called "Counsellor of
the Empress" when he ought to have had his photograph exposed in the
London shop-windows like King Cetewayo, K.C.M.G. I have heard an
eminent Frontier General called "Judas Iscariot," and I myself was
once pointed out as a "Famine Commissioner," and afterwards as an
expurgated edition of the Secretary to the Punjab Government. People
seemed to think that Ali Baba would smell sweeter under some other
name. This was a mistake.

Almost everything you are told in Simla is a mistake. You should never
believe anything you hear till it is contradicted by the _Pioneer_. I
suppose the Government of India is the greatest _gobemouche_ in the
world. I suppose there never was an administration of equal importance
which received so much information and which was so ill-informed. At a
bureaucratic Simla dinner-party the abysses of ignorance that yawn
below the company on every Indian topic are quite appalling!

I once heard Mr. Stokes say that he had never heard of my book on the
Permanent Settlement; and yet Mr. Stokes is a decidedly intelligent
man, with some knowledge of Cymric and law. I daresay now if you were
to draw off and decant the law on his brain, it would amount to a full
dose for an adult; yet he never heard of my book on the Permanent
Settlement. He knew about Blackstone; he had seen an old copy once in
a second-hand book shop; but he had never heard of my work! How
loosely the world floats around us! I question its objective reality.
I doubt whether anything has more objectivity in it than Ali Baba
himself. He was certainly flogged at school. Yet when we now try to
put our finger on Ali Baba he eludes the touch; when we try to lay him
he starts up gibbering at Cabul, Lahore, or elsewhere. Perhaps it is
easier to imprison him in morocco boards and allow him to be blown
with restless violence round about the pendant world, abandoned to
critics: whom our lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling.

[Ali Baba! I know not what thou art, but know that thou and I must
part; and why or where and how we met, I own to me's a secret yet. Ali
Baba, we've been long together through pleasant and through cloudy
weather; 'tis hard to part when things are dear, bar silver, piece
cloth, bottled beer, then steal away with this short warning: choose
thine own winding-sheet, say not good-night here, but in some brighter
binding, sweet, bid me good morning.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.




EXTRACTS FROM _SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS_.

BY "OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN."

_The Bombay Gazette Press_, 1881.

No. XXXIV



THE TEAPOT SERIES



SOCIAL DISSECTION



[January 5, 1880.]



GOSSIP I.

MY DEAR MRS. SMITH,

I cannot understand why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd figure--for really
I can apply no other adjective to it--should wear that most absurdly
tight dress. Some one should tell her what a fright it makes of her.
She is nothing but convexities. She looks exactly like an hour-glass,
or a sodawater machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell
whether she is coming to you, or going away from you. She looks just
the same all round. People call her smile sweet; but then it is the
mere sweetness of inanity. It is the blank brightness of an empty
chamber. She sheds these smiles upon everyone and everything, and they
are felt to be cold like moonshine. Speaking for myself, these
_eau-sucré_ smiles could not suckle my love. I would languish upon
them. My love demands stronger drink. Mrs. Smith's features are good,
no doubt. Her eyes are good. An oculist would be satisfied with them.
They have a cornea, a crystalline lens, a retina, and so on, and she
can see with them. This is all very satisfactory, I do not deny, as
far as it goes. Physiologically her eyes are admirable; but for
poetry, for love, or even for flirting, they are useless. There is no
significance in them, no witchery, no suggestiveness. The aurora of
beautiful far-away thoughts does not coruscate in them. Her eyelids
conceal them, but do not quench them. They would be nothing for
winking, or tears. If she winked at me, I should not jump into the
air, as if shot in the spine, with my blood tingling to my
extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum; my blushes
would not come perspiring through my whiskers. Her winking would
altogether misfire. Why? Because her winking would be physiological
and not erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would not be for
any lovelight in her eye; it would never be the quick, fierce, hot,
biting electric passion of the fleshly poets, it would be what a
chemist might call the "eremacausis" kindled by habit. Mrs. Smith's
tears are quite the poorest product of the lachrymal glands I have
ever seen. They are simply a form of water. They might dribble from an
effete pump; they might leak from a worn-out _mashq_.[AA] I observe
them with pity and regret. Their drip has no echo in my bosom; it
produces no stalactites of sympathy in my heart.

I have often been told that her nose was good--and good it
unquestionably is--good for blowing; good for sneezing; good for
snoring; good for smelling; a fine nose for a catarrh. But who could
play with it? Who could tweak it passionately, as a prelude to
kissing? Who could linger over it tenderly with a candle, or a lump of
mutton fat, when cold had laid its cruel hand upon it? It is not
tip-tilted like a flower; it is not whimsical with some ravishing and
unexpected little crook. It is straight, like a mathematical line. But
it has no parts. Her cheeks are round and fair. Each has its dimple
and blush. They are thoroughly healthy, Mrs. Smith's digestion is
unexceptionable. You might indicate the contour of these cheeks with a
pair of compasses; you might paint them with your thumb. Poor Mrs.
Smith's talk, or babble rather, is of her husband, her children, her
home. It is a mere purring over them. She never cuts them to pieces,
and holds them up to scorn and mockery. She never penetrates their
weaknesses. She does not even understand that Smith is a common-place,
stereotyped kind of fellow, exactly like hundreds of other men in his
class. She does not appear to notice the ghastly defects in his
education, tastes, and character, which gape before all the world
else. She does not see that he is without the _morbidezza_ of culture;
that he finds no _appogiatura_ in art; that he never rises at
midnight, amid lightning and rain, to emit an inarticulate cry of
æsthetic anguish in some metrical construction of the renaissance
period. She does not miss in him that yearning after the unattainable,
which in some mysterious wise fills us with a mute despair; which has
in it yet I know not what of sweetness amid the delirious aspirations
with which it distracts us. She cannot know, with her base instincts
dragging her down to the hearth-level of home and child, the material
gracelessness of her husband, equally incapable of striking an
Anglo-Saxon, or a mediæval attitude; and with his blood flushed,
healthy face unable to realize in his expression that divine sorrow
which can alone distinguish the man of culture from ordinary
Englishmen, or the anthropoid apes. She will never know what vibrates
so harshly on us--the want of feeling for colour which is displayed in
the coarse tone of his brown hair. So in regard to her children, the
mind of Mrs. Smith is quite uncritical. Look at that baby, like a
thousand other babies you see every day. It has not a single
idiosyncrasy on which anyone above the intellectual level of a
_crétin_ could hang an affection. Its porcine eyes twinkle dimly
through rolls of fat; it splutters and puffs, and its habits are
simply abominable. What a gross home for that life's star, which hath
had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar! The star is quenched
in fat; it has exchanged the music of the spheres for a hideous
caterwauling! Yet Mrs. Smith loves that child, and gobbles over it,
descending to its abysses of grossness.

Her house is one of many in a long unlovely street; it is furnished
according to the most corrupt dictates of bestial Philistinism--that
is, with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the
papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone
in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion,
concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye
and foolish heart, loves this wretched shelter, and would pour out her
idiotic tears if she were leaving it for Paradise.

But if we descend from our aesthetic heights to the lowly level of the
biped Smith, we may see Mrs. S. in a totally different atmosphere, and
certain lights and shadows will play about her with a radiance not
altogether without beauty. She is a single-minded woman, anxious to
make her husband and children comfortable and happy in their
home,--and dreaming of nothing beyond this. She is full of homely
wisdom; a hundred little economies she practises with forethought and
unwearying assiduity tend to make her husband and children love her
and regard her as a paragon of domestic policy. Her husband's
affection and her children's affection are all the world to her; music
and painting and poetry, Mr. Ruskin, Phidias, Praxiteles, Holman Hunt,
and Mr. Whistler pale away into shadows of shadows in presence of the
indications of love she receives from that baby. And this intense
single-minded love elevates her within its own compass. She sees in
that baby's eyes the light that never was on sea or land, the
consecration and the mother's dream. She broods over it till she
effects for it in her own maternal fancy an apotheosis; and round its
image in her heart there glows a bright halo of poetry. She sees
through the fat. The grossness disappears before her rapt gaze. There
remains the spirit from heaven:--

      Sweet spirit newly come from Heaven
      With all the God upon thee, still
      Beams of no earthly light are given
      Thy heart e'en yet to bless and fill.
      Thy soul a sky whose sun has set,
      Wears glory hovering round it yet;
      And childhood's eve glows sadly bright
      Ere life hath deepened into night.

So with the husband; so with the home; a glory gathers round them,
which she alone, the intense worshipper, sees; and this unæsthetic
Mrs. Smith, altogether unsatisfactory to the artistic eye, most
practical, most commonplace, carries within her some of the Promethean
flame, and is worthy of that halo of homely joy and affection with
which she is crowned.




No. XXXV



SAHIB



[February 19, 1880.]

I first met him driving home from cutcherry in his buggy. He was a fat
man in the early afternoon of life. In his blue eyes lay the mystery
of many a secret salad and unwritten milk-punch; but though he smoked
the longest cheroots of Trichinopoly and Dindigul, his hand was still
steady and still grasped a cue or a long tumbler, with the unerring
certainty of early youth and unshaken health.

Of an evening he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he
would "just drop in," as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand
fashion, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid
genial smiles and a brandishing of his long cheroot, playfully
indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which he had been long
acquainted.

As he began to glow with conversation and brandy, he would call for
cards and play écarté with me, until the room gradually resolved
itself into one of the circles of some Californian Inferno, with a
knave of spades digging the diamonds out of my heart and clubbing my
trumps.

He would leave me throbbing with the eructation of oaths and the
hollow aching of an empty purse, and uncertain whether to give up
cards and liquor for hymns and Government paper or whether to call him
back and take fortune by storm. But he had gone off with a resolute
"good night" that tended to dispel illusions; he had gone to his own
No. 1 Exshaw and his French novels, which he read as he lay on his
solitary bachelor couch.

Yes,--his bachelor couch, for he was not married. He had loved much
and often. He had loved a great many people in different stations of
life, but they did not marry him. He was, upon the whole, glad that
they did not marry him; for they were often married to other people,
and he would have been lonely with one, dissatisfied with two, and
embarrassed with more; so he continued his austere bachelor life; and
always tried to love unostentatiously somebody else's wife.

He loved somebody else's wife, because he had no wife of his own, and
the heart requires love. It was very wrong of him to love somebody
else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged to
another; but then he had nothing puritanical or pharisaical in his
nature; he was too highly cultivated to be moral, and arguing the
point in the mood of sweet _Barbara_, he had often succeeded in
persuading pretty women that he did right in loving them, though their
household duties belonged to another.

I have said that he was too highly cultivated to be religious. He was
exceedingly emotional and intellectual; and the procrustean bed of a
creed would have been intolerable torture to him. Life throbbed around
him in an aurora of skittles. The world of morality only raised a
languid smile, or tickled an appetite pleased with novelty. An
archdeacon, or a book of sermons delighted him. He would play with
them and ponder over them, as if they were old china, or curious
etchings. But he was never profane, especially before bishops, or
children, and he always went to church on Sunday morning.

He went to church on Sunday morning, because it was quaint and
old-fashioned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his
acquaintance in their devotional moods and attitudes. There was hardly
any mood or attitude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly
because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly for
other reasons. I suppose he was a student of human nature, though he
always repudiated the notion of being a student of anything. He said
that life was too short for serious study, and that every kind of
pursuit should be tempered with fooling; while to prevent fooling
becoming wearisome it should always be dashed with something earnest,
as the sodawater is dashed with brandy, or the Government of India
with Mr. Whitley Stokes.

      Nigrorum memor, dum licet, ignium,
      Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem:
      Dulce est desipere in loco.

But besides being a man of pleasure and a capital billiard player, he
was a Collector in the North-Western Provinces--a man who sat at the
receipt of custom under a punkah, and read his _Pioneer_. The Lord
High Cockalorum at Nynee Tal, Sir Somebody Thingmajig,--I am speaking
of years ago--did not like him, I believe; but nobody thought any the
worse of him for this; and although he continued to be a Collector
until the shades of evening, when all his contemporaries had retired
into the Dreamland of Commissionerships, he still loved and was loved;
and to the very last he read his French novels and quoted Horace,
sitting peacefully on the bank while the stream of promotion rolled
on, knowing well that it would roll on _in omne ævum_, and not caring
a jot whether it did, or did not. What was a seat at the Sadr
Board[BB] to him, a seat among the solemn mummies of the service? He
would not object to lie in the same graveyard with them; but to sit at
the same board while this sensible warm motion of life still continued
was too much; this could never be. He belonged to a higher order of
spirits. As a boy he had not bartered the music of his soul for
Eastern languages and the Rent Law; and as an old man he would not sit
in state with corpses faintly animated by rupees.

To the last he mocked promotion; he mocked, till the dread mocker laid
mocking fingers on his liver, and till gibe and laughter were silenced
for evermore. So the Collector died, the merry Collector; and "where
shall we bury the merry Collector?" became the last problem for his
friends to deal with. I was in far away lands at the time with another
friend of his--we mourned for the Collector.

We would have buried him in soft summer weather under sweet arbute
trees, near the shore of some murmuring Italian sea. The west wind
should whisper its grief over his grave for ever:--

      "Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
      The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
      Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
      Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
      And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
      Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
      All overgrown with azure moss and flowers."

Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous
rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until
time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would
nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of
inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering
shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--

      "Where through groves deep and high,
      Sounds the far billow,
      Where early violets die under the willow.
      There, through the summer day,
      Cool streams are laving;
      There, while the tempests sway,
      Scarce are boughs waving;
      There thy rest should'st thou take,
      Parted for ever,
      Never again to wake: never, O never!"

With tender hand we would have traced on his memorial urn some
valediction--not without hope--of love and friendship.

It was otherwise. He was buried during a dust-storm in a loathsome
Indian cemetery. No friend stood by the grave. A hard priest
reluctantly pattered an abbreviated service: and people whispered that
it was not well with the Collector's soul. He is now forgotten.

But, dear friend, thy memory blossoms in my heart for ever, thy merry
laugh will still sound in my ear:--

      "Abiding with me till I sail
      To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
      And this electric force, that keeps
      A thousand pulses dancing, fail."




No. XXXVIII



THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS



[March 29, 1880.]


For some days the moustaches had been assuming a fiercer curl; more
and more troopers had been added to the escort; the Lord whispered in
the unreluctant ear softer and softer nothings; the scarlet runners
bowed lower and lower; and it was rumoured that the Lord had given the
Gryphon a pot of his own club-mutton hair-grease. It would be a halo.
This development of glory must have a limit: a feeling got abroad that
the Gryphon must go.

The Commander-in-Chief would come up to him bathed in smiles and say
nothing; at other times with tears in his eyes he would swear with far
resounding, multitudinous oaths to accompany the Gryphon. One day
Wolseley's pocket-book and a tooth-brush would be packed in tin; next
day they would be unpacked. The vacillation was awful; it amounted to
an agony; it involved all the circles; the newspapers were profoundly
moved.

The Gryphon starts. Editors forget their proofs; Baboos forget Moses;
mothers forget their cicisbeos. The mind of Calcutta is turned upon
the Gryphon.

A thousand blue eyes and ten thousand black focus him. He takes his
seat. A double-first class carriage has been reserved. The
Superintendent-General of Balloons and Fireworks appears on the
platform: the Gryphon steps out, takes precedence of him, and then
returns to his carriage. The excitement increases. Pre-paid telegrams
are flashed to Bombay, Madras, Allahabad, and Lahore; the engine
whistles "God save the Queen-Empress and the Secretary to the Punjab
Government;" and the train pours out its glories into the darkness.

My Lord is deeply stirred. He believes the Asian mystery has been
solved. He returns to Government House and gives vent to his
overwrought feelings in smoke--Parascho cigarettes; then he telegraphs
himself to sleep. Dreams sweep over him, issuing from the fabled gates
of shining ivory.

Meanwhile the Gryphon speeds on, yearning like a god in pain for his
far-away aphelion in Kabul. Morning bashfully overtakes him; and the
train dances into stations festooned with branches of olive and palm.
A _feu-de-joie_ of champagne corks is fired; special correspondents in
clean white trousers enliven the scene; Baron Reuter's ubiquitous
young man turns on rapturous telegrams; and a faint smile dawns darkly
on the Gryphon's scorn-worn face.

Merrily shrieks the whistling engine as the Punjab comes sliding down,
the round world to welcome its curled darling. It spurns with
contemptuous piston the vulgar corn-growing provinces of Couper; it
seeks the fields that are sown with dragon's teeth; it hisses forward
with furious joy, like the flaming chariot of some Heaven-booked
Prophet. Already Egerton anticipates its welcome advent. He can hardly
sit still on his pro-consular throne; he smiles in dockets and
demi-officials; he walks up and down his alabaster halls, and out into
his gardens of asphodel, and snuffs the air. It is redolent with some
rare effluvium; pomatum-laden winds breathe across the daffadown
dillies from the warm chambers of the south. A cloud crosses His
Honour's face, a summer cloud dissolving into sunshine. "It is the
pomade of Saul:--but it is our own glorious David whose unctuous curls
carry the Elysian fragrance." Then taking up his harp and dancing an
ecstatic measure, he sings--

      "He is coming, my Gryphon, my swell;
      Were it ever so laden with care,
      My heart would know him, and smell
      The grease in his coal-black hair."

The whole of the Punjab is astir. Deputy Commissioners, and Extra
Assistant Commissioners, and Kookas, and Sikhs, and Mazhabi-Sikhs
crowd the stations; but the Gryphon passes fiercely onwards. The light
of battle is now in his eye; he is in uniform; a political sword hangs
from his divine waist; a looking-glass poses itself before him. Life
burns wildly in his heart: time throbs along in hot seconds; Eternity
unfolds around her far-receding horizons of glory.

The train emits telegrams as it hurls itself forward: "the Gryphon is
well:--he is in the presence of his Future:--History watches him:--he
is drinking a peg:--the _Civil and Military Gazette_ has caught a
glimpse of him:--glory, glory, glory, to the Gryphon, the mock turtle
is his wash-pot, over Lyall will he cast his shoe."

Earthquakes are felt all along the line from Peshawar to Kabul.
Strings of camels laden with portmanteaus stretch from the rising to
the setting sun. The whole of the Guides and Bengal Cavalry have
resolved themselves into orderlies, and are riding behind the Gryphon.
Tens of thousands of insurgents are lining the road and making holiday
to see the Gryphon pass.

Kabul is astir. Roberts, with bare feet and a rope round his neck,
comes forward, performs _Kadambosi_ and presents the keys of Sherpur
to the Gryphon, who hands them graciously to his Extra Assistant
Deputy Khidmatgar General. The wires are red hot with messages: "The
Gryphon is taking a pill; the Gryphon is bathing; the Gryphon is
breakfasting; the Gryphon is making a joke; the Gryphon has been
bitten by a flea; the wound is not pronounced dangerous, he is
recovering slowly:--Glory, glory to the Gryphon--Amen, amen!"--
YOUR POLITICAL ORPHAN.




No. XXXIX



THE ORPHAN'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS



[June 8, 1880.]

      Part I.--Persons I will try to avoid.
       "  II.--Things I will try to avoid.
       " III.--Habits I will try to avoid.
       "  IV.--Opinions I will try to avoid.
       "   V.--Circumstances I will try to avoid.

       *       *       *       *       *




PART I.--BAD COMPANY.



PERSONS I WILL TRY TO AVOID.



1.

He has a villa in the country; but his place of business is in town;
somewhere near Sackville Street. Vulgarity had marked him for her own
at an early age. She had set her mark indelibly on his speech, his
manners, and his habits. When ten years old he had learned to aspirate
his initial vowels; when twelve he had mastered the whole theory and
practice of eating cheese with his knife; at seventeen his mind was
saturated with ribald music of the Vaudeville type.

Reader, you anticipate me? You suppose I refer to one of Mr.
Gladstone's new Ministers, or to one of Lord Beaconsfield's new
Baronets?

You are, of course, mistaken. My man is a tailor; one of the best
tailors in the world. He has made hundreds of coats for me; and he has
sent me hundreds of circulars and bills.

Now, however, he has lost my address, and there seems a coolness
between us. We stand aloof; the scars remaining.

His name is Sartor, and I owe him a good deal of money.



2.

He is always up to the Hills when the weather is unpleasant on the
plains. Butterfly-collecting, singing to a guitar passionate songs of
love and hate, and lying the live-long day on a long chair with a long
tumbler in his hand, and a volume of Longfellow on the floor, are his
characteristic pursuits. It is needless to say that he is the
Accountant-General, and the last man in the world to suppose that I
have given myself ten days' privilege leave to the Hills on urgent
private affairs,--_affairs de coeur_, and _affairs de rien_, of sorts.



3.

His head is shaved to the bone; his face, of the Semitic type, is most
sinister, truculent, and ferocious; his filthy Afghan rags bristle
with knives and tulwars. He carries five or six matchlocks under one
arm, and a hymn book, or Koran, under the other. He is in holy
orders--a Ghazi! A pint, or a pint and a half, of my blood, would earn
for him Paradise, with sharab, houris, and all the rest of it.



4.

He was once an exceedingly pleasant fellow, full of talk and anecdote.
We were at school together. He was captain of our eleven and at the
head of the sixth form. I looked up to him; quoted him; imitated him;
lent him my pocket money. Afterwards a great many other people lent
him their money too, and played _écarté_ with him; yet at no period of
his life was he rich, and now he is decidedly poor. Still the old love
of borrowing money and playing _écarté_ burns hectically in his bosom,
and with years a habit of turning up the king has grown upon him. No
one likes to tell him that he has acquired this habit of turning up
the king; he is so poor!



5.

She was rather nice-looking once, and I amused myself with fancying
that I loved her. She was to me the summer pilot of an empty heart
unto the shores of nothing. It was then that I acquired that facility
in versification which has since so often helped to bind a book, or
line a box, or served to curl a maiden's locks. She, learned reams of
those verses by heart, and still repeats them. Her good looks and my
illusions have passed away: but those verses--those thrice accursed
verses, remain. How they make my ears tingle! How they burn my cheeks!
Will time, think you, never impair her infernal memory?



6.

I lisp a little, it is true; but, thank goodness, no longer in
numbers. I only lisp a little when any occasion arises to utter
sibilant sounds; on such occasions this little girl, the only child of
her mother, and she a widow, mimics my infirmity. The widow is silly
and laughs nervously, as people with a fine sense of humour laugh in
church when a book falls. This laugh of the widow is not easy to bear;
for she is pretty. Were she not pretty her mocking child would come, I
ween, to some untimely end.



7.

My Lord is, more or less, admired by two or three young ladies I know;
and when he puts his arm round my neck and drags me up and down a
crowded ball-room I cannot help wishing that they were in the pillory
instead of me. I really wish to be polite to H.E., but how can I say
that I think he was justified in finessing his deficit and playing
surpluses?

How can I agree with him when he says that Abdur Rahman will come
galloping in to Cabul to tender his submission as soon as he receives
Mr. Lepel Griffin's photograph neatly wrapped up in a Post Office
Order for two lakhs of rupees? And then that Star of India he is
always pressing on me! As I say to him,--what should I do with it?

I can't go hanging things round my neck like King Coffee Calcalli, or
the Emperor of Blue China.

But soon it will not be difficult for me to avoid my Lord: for

      "Sic desideriis icta fidelibus
      Quærit patria Cæsarem."



8.

He still smiles when we meet; and I don't think any the less of him
because he was called "Bumble" at school and afterwards made Governor
of Bombay. Men drift unconsciously into these things. But when I
happen to be near him he has a nervous way of lunging with his stick
that I can't quite get over. They say he once dreamt that I had poked
fun at him in a newspaper; and the hallucination continues to produce
an angry aberration of his mind, coupled with gnashing of the teeth
and other dangerous symptoms.



9.

He is a huge gob of flesh, which is perhaps animated dimly by some
spark of humanity smouldering filthily in a heart cancerous with
money-grubbing. His whole character and mode of life stink with
poisonous exhalations in my moral nostrils. Nature denounces, in her
loud commination service, his clammy hand, his restless eye, his
sinister and bestial mouth. Why should he waken me from the dreams of
literature and the low music of my own reflections to disgorge from
the cesspool of his mind the impertinent questions and the loathsome
compliments which form his notion of conversation? He has come to "pay
his respects." I abhor "his respects." He is rich:--What is that to
me? He is powerful with all the power of corruption: I scorn his
power, I figuratively spit upon it. He is perhaps the man whom the
Government delights to honour. More shame to the Government! A bully
at home, and a tyrant among his own people, on all sides dastardly and
mean, he is a bad representative of a gentle and intellectual race,
that for its heroic traditions, its high thoughts, its noble language
and its exquisite urbanity has been the wonder of the whole world
since the dawn of history.



10.

A cocked hat, a tailcoat with gold buttons and a rapier:--"See'st thou
not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not his gait in it
the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court-odour from him?
Reflects he not on thy baseness court-contempt?" Observe how
mysterious he is: consider the secrets burning on his tongue. He is
all asides and whispers and winks and nods to other young popinjays of
the same feather. He could tell you the very brand of the pills the
Raja is taking: he receives the paltriest gossip of the Nawab's court
filtered through a lying vakeel. Ten to one he carries in his pocket a
cipher telegram from Simla empowering him to confer the title of
_Jee_[CC] on some neighbouring Thakor. Surely it is no wonder that he
believes himself to be the hub of creation. Within a radius of twenty
miles there is no one even fit to come between the wind and his
nobility. If he should ever catch hold of you by the arm and take you
aside for a moment from the madding crowd of a lawn-tennis party to
whisper in your ear the arrival of a complimentary _Kharita_ and a
pound of sweetmeats from the Foreign Office for the Jam of Bredanbatta
you should let off smiles and blushes in token of the honour and glory
thus placed at your credit.



11.

All Assistant-Magistrates on their first arrival in this country,
stuffed like Christmas turkeys with abstracts and notes, the pemmican
of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but
the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts
with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature
_ennui_ is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never
known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of
undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities
and little attentions in the shape of guineas and stalls at the opera,
such as good-natured seniors delight to show to promising young
kinsmen and friends. Yet his talk is of the studio, the editor's room,
and the club; it is flavoured with the _argot_ of the great world, the
half world and Bohemia; he flings great names in your face, dropping
with a sublime familiarity the vulgar prefixes of "Mr." and "Lord,"
and he overwhelms you with his knowledge of women and their wicked
ways. Clever Ouida, with her tawdry splendours, her guardsmen, her
peers, her painters and her Aspasias, and the "society papers," with
their confidences and their personalities, have much to answer for in
the case of this would-be man of the world.




No. XL



SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA



[October 21, 1880.]

There were thirteen of them, and they sat down to dinner just as the
clock in the steeple chimed midnight. The sheeted dead squeaked and
gibbered in their graves; the owl hooted in the ivy. "For what we are
going to receive may the Secret Powers of Nature and the force of
circumstances make us truly thankful," devoutly exclaimed the domestic
medium. The spirits of Chaos and Cosmos rapped a courteous
acknowledgment on the table. _Potage à la sorcière_ (after the famous
recipe in Macbeth) was served in a cauldron; and while it was being
handed round, Hume recited his celebrated argument regarding miracles.
He had hardly reached the twenty-fifth hypothesis, when a sharp cry
startled the company, and Mr. Cyper Redalf, the eminent journalist,
was observed to lean back in his chair, pale and speechless. His whole
frame was convulsed with emotion; his hair stood erect and emitted
electro-biological sparks. The company sat aghast. A basin of soup
dashed in his face and a few mesmeric passes soon brought him round,
however; and presently he was able to explain to the assembled
carousers the cause of his agitation. It was a recollection, a tender
memory of youth. The umbrella of his boyhood had suddenly surged upon
his imagination! It was an umbrella from which he had been parted for
years: it was an umbrella round which had once centred associations
solemn and mysterious. In itself there had been nothing remarkable
about the umbrella. It was a gingham, conceived in the liberal spirit
of a bygone age; such an umbrella as you would not easily forget when
it had once fairly bloomed on the retina of your eye; yet an everyday
umbrella, a commonplace umbrella half a century ago; an umbrella that
would have elicited no remark from our great-grandmothers, hardly a
smile from our grandmothers; but an umbrella well calculated to excite
the affections and stimulate the imagination of an impulsive,
high-spirited, and impressionable boy. It was an umbrella not easily
forgotten; an umbrella that necessarily produced a large and deep
impression on the mind.

All present were profoundly moved; a feeling of dismay crept over
them, defacing their festivity. Tears were shed. Only from one pair of
damp eyes did any gleam of hope or comfort radiate.

A distinguished foreigner, well known in the uttermost spirit-circles,
wiped from his brow drops of perspiration which some dream had
loosened from his brain. He felt the tide of psychic force beating
upon the high shores of his heart. He was conscious of a
constitutional change sweeping like a tempest over his protoplastic
tissue. He felt that the secret fountains of his being were troubled
by the angel of spirit-rapping, and that his gross, unbelieving
nature stepped down, bathed, and was healed. The Moses of the
spirit-wilderness struck the rock of his material life, and occult
dynamics came welling forth from the undiscovered springs of
consciousness. His mortal statics lost their equilibrium in a general
flux of soul. A cyclone raged round his mesmeric aura. He began to
apprehend an epiphany of electro-biological potentiality. The fierce
light that never was in kerosine or tallow dawned round him; matter
melted like mist; souls were carousing about him; the great soul of
nature brooded like an aurora of clairvoyance above all; his awful
mediumhood held him fiercely in her mystic domination; and things grew
to a point. From the focus of the clairvoyant aurora clouds of
creative impulse gathered, and sweeping soulward were condensed in
immaterial atoms upon the cold peaks of Purpose. Thus a spiritual
gingham impressed upon his soul of souls a matrix, out of which, by a
fine progenitive effort, he now begets and ejects a materialized
gingham into a potato-plot of the garden without.

The thing is patent to all who live above the dead-level of vulgar
imbecility. No head of a department could fail to understand it.
Indeed, to such as live on the uplands of speculation, not only is the
process lucid in itself, but it is luciferous, illuminating all the
obscure hiding-places of Nature. It is the magic-lantern of creation;
it is the key to all mysticism, to the three-card trick, and to the
basket-trick; it sheds a glory upon thimble-rigging, a halo upon
legerdemain; it even radiates vagabond beams of splendour upon
pocket-picking and the cognate arts. It explains how the apples get
into the dumpling; how the milk comes out of the cocoanut; how the
deficit issues from the surplus; how matter evolves itself from
nothing. It renders the hypothesis of a First Cause not only
unnecessary, but exquisitely ludicrous. Under such dry light as it
offers to our intelligence the whole epos of Christianity seems a
vapid dream.

But I anticipate conclusions. We must go back to the dinner-party and
to Mr. Cyper Redalf, who has been restored to consciousness, and who
still is the object of general sympathy; for it is not until the
disturbance in the distinguished foreigner's nerve aura has amounted
to a psychic cyclone that the company perceive his interesting
condition, and begin to look for a manifestation. The hopes of some
fondly turn to raps, others desire the pressure of a spirit hand, or
the ringing of a bell, or the levitation of furniture, or the sound of
a spirit voice, the music of an immaterial larynx. Dinner is soon
forgotten; the thing has become a _séance_, hands are joined, the
lights are instinctively lowered, and the whole company, following an
irresistible impulse, march round and round the room, and then out
into the darkness after the soul-stirred foreigner, after the
foreigner of distinction. Is it unconscious cerebration that leads
them to the potato-plot, or is it the irresistible influence of some
Supreme Power, something more occult and more interesting than God,
that compels them to fall on their knees, and grub with their hands in
the recently manured potato-bed? I must leave this question
unanswered, as a sufficiently occult explanation does not occur to me:
but suffice it to say that this search after truth, this burrowing in
the gross earth for some spiritual sign, appears to me a spectacle at
once inspiring and touching. It seems to me that human life has seldom
had anything more beautiful and more ennobling to show than these
postmaster-generals, boards of revenue, able editors, and foreigners
of distinction asking Truth, the Everlasting Verity, for a sign and
then searching for it in a potato-field. In this glorious quest every
circumstance demands our respectful attention. They search on their
hands and knees in the attitude of passionate prayer; they search in
the dark; they seize the dumb earth with delirious fingers; they knock
their heads against one another and against the dull, hard trunks of
trees. Still they search: they wrestle with the Earth: she must yield
up her secrets. Nor will Earth deny to them the desired boon. Theirs
is the true spirit of devout inquiry, and they are persons of
consideration in evening-dress. Nature will unveil her charms. Earth
with the groans of an infinite pain, a boundless travail, yields up
the gingham umbrella.

We will not intrude upon their immediate rapture as they carry their
treasure away with loving hands; but it is necessary to note the means
taken to prove, for the satisfaction only of a foolish and unbelieving
world, the supernatural nature of the phenomenon. The umbrella is
examined under severe test conditions: it is weighed in a vacuum, and
placed under the spectroscope. It is found to be porous and a
conductor of heat; but it is not soluble in water, though it boils at
500° Fahr. To demonstrate the absence of trickery or collusion
everyone turns up his sleeves and empties his waistcoat pockets. There
is no room for sleight of hand in presence of this searching
scientific investigation. The umbrella _is_ certainly _not_ a
supposititious animal; yet it is the umbrella of Mr. Cyper Redalf's
boyhood. No one can doubt this who sees him clasp it in a fond
embrace, who sees him shed burning tears on its voluminous folds.--THE
ORPHAN.




ELUCIDATIONS



No. 1



WITH THE VICEROY

The late Edward Robert Bulwer, First Earl of Lytton (1831-1891),
Viceroy and Governor-General of India from April 12, 1876, to June 8,
1880, is here depicted from the superficial point of view of his
character as a man, a poet, and a statesman generally current at the
time.

Lord Lytton was thoroughly unconventional in all his manners and
moods, and in his methods of conducting the affairs of his great
office.

As a boy of seven he was already scribbling verses; and he wrote a
poem, "The Prisoner of Provence," which turns upon the famous story of
the Man in the Iron Mask, only two or three months before his death.
In fact, all through Lord Lytton's distinguished career, as his father
had done before him, he found recreation in change of employment. As
forcibly and eloquently stated by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in
her introduction to the 1894 edition of his Selected Poems, "The minds
of both were ceaselessly active, and they turned without a pause from
one kind of thought and business to another as readily as they turned
from either to easy, disengaged conversation. Had the rival calls of
his many-sided intellect been at variance, the poet in my father would
always have had the preference."

Ali Baba, it may be taken for granted, did not intend to characterise
as "a flood of twaddle" the whole of Lord Lytton's verse. Poetry
which, as far as published up to 1855, called forth from Leigh Hunt
warm praise for its beauties and mercy for its defects, in these words
embodied in a letter to Mr. John Forster, the friend and biographer of
Charles Dickens.--

      "I have read every bit of Owen Meredith's [his now
      well-known pseudonym] volume, and it has left me in a state
      of delighted admiration. He is a truly musical, reflecting,
      impassioned and imaginative poet, with a tendency to but one
      of the faults of his contemporaries and that chiefly in his
      minor pieces--I mean the doing too much, and the giving too
      much importance and emphasis to every fancy and image that
      comes across him, so that his pictures lose their proper
      distribution of light and shade, nay, of distinction between
      great and small. On his greatest occasions, however, he can
      evidently rid himself of this fault."

During Lord Lytton's Indian career, those who were on political or
self-interested grounds opposed to his policy--and there were many
such--were wont, as recorded by his daughter, to attempt to discredit
the statesman by reiterating that he was a poet.

As a matter of fact, Aberigh Mackay's acquaintance with Lord Lytton's
poetry was mainly, if not entirely, based upon a volume edited by N.A.
Chick, and published in Calcutta in 1877, quaintly entitled: "The
Imperial Bouquet of Pretty Flowers from the Poetical Parterre of
Robert Lord Lytton, Viceroy and Governor-General of India."

Our Author's knowledge of Lord Lytton's Indian Administration was
necessarily based upon the views--_pro_ and _con_--expressed by the
daily newspaper writers of the period, who wrote, of course,
uninitiated in political affairs as a rule, and without those full
expositions now embodied in many notable recent publications, official
and other, foremost among which we would cite Lady Betty Balfour's
History of his Indian Administration, published in 1899, and her
edition of her father's personal and literary letters, issued in two
vols. in 1906.

Verily "Time tries All," and an impartial and notable summary of Lord
Lytton's services to his country, written by the Reverend W. Elvin, is
engraven on the monument to his memory in the crypt of St. Paul's
Cathedral, which was designed and partially carried out by the
sculptor, Mr. Gilbert.

+HE WAS A DIPLOMATIST RICK IN THE QUALITIES, OFFICIAL, AND SOCIAL, BY
WHICH AMITY WITH FOREIGN NATIONS IS MAINTAINED.+

+A VICEROY INDEPENDENT IN HIS VIEWS, RESOLUTE IN ACTION, LOOKING
FORWARD TO THE FUTURE.+

+A POET OF MANY STYLES, EACH THE EXPRESSION OF HIS HABITUAL THOUGHTS.+

+A MAN OF SUPERIOR FACULTIES HIGHLY CULTIVATED BE LITERATURE, ARDENT
IN HIS AFFECTIONS, TENDER AND GENEROUS IN ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF
LIFE, LAVISH IN HIS COMMENDATION OF OTHERS, AND HUMBLE IN HIS ESTIMATE
OF HIMSELF.+

As a good example of Lord Lytton's independent views, and tenderness
and generosity in all the circumstances of life, the following
incident may be quoted:--

Among many changes in Indian administration which he initiated, and
which were severely decried at the time, but the benefits of which
experience has amply vindicated, was the amalgamation of Oudh with, or
rather annexation to, the North-Western Provinces, the final
arrangements being completed at the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi on
January 1 1877, with the concurrence--which he had sought
previously--of all the principal Talukdars of Oudh there assembled.

The great pageant at Delhi (which formed the subject of Ali Baba's
first contribution to _Vanity Fair_, and which he attended officially
as the Guardian of the Raja of Rutlam), so far from being a mere empty
show, as then decried by his political foes, enabled the Viceroy to
settle, promptly and satisfactorily by personal conferences, a great
many important administrative questions. All as recorded by him in his
narrative letter of December 23, 1876, to January 10, 1877, to her
late Majesty Queen Victoria, which embraced events at Delhi, Pattiala,
Umballa, Aligurh, and Agra.

Among the Oudh officials who were dispossessed of their appointments
in 1877, some of them with but scanty compensation, was the late Mr.
(afterwards Sir) E.N.C. Braddon, a kinsman of the novelist, who held
the appointment of Superintendent of Stamps, Stationery, and
Registration at Lucknow. Mr. Braddon was an uncovenanted servant of
comparatively short service, and eligible for s very moderate
compensation. Lord Lytton, unsolicited, took up his case, overruled
various objections, obtained liberal terms for Mr. Braddon by which he
was able to resign his appointment and proceed to Tasmania, where he
entered political life, rising to be Premier and afterwards
Agent-General for that Colony in London, and ultimately obtaining, in
1891, his K.C.M.G.

It was to Lord Lytton's personal action--in the face of would-be
obsequious apathy in certain quarters--that Aberigh-Mackay, the
youngest on the list, was nominated a Fellow of the Calcutta
University in 1880, an honour usually reserved for officials of high
standing. He then availed himself of that status to bring about the
affiliation of the Rajkumar College at Indore to the same University,
with, as a matter of course, the concurrence of the Syndicate.




No. 2



THE A.-D.-C.-IN-WAITING

We have here an admirable summary of the highly important personal
duties of a tactful A.D.C. to an Indian Viceroy. Not the least
important being the superintendence of the Invitation Department. It
was in this very connection that an A.D.C. to an Indian Governor,
fresh from a West Indian appointment and Society somewhat on "Tom
Cringle's Log" conditions, by issuing invitations to a _Quality
Dance_, gave rise, in Southern India, to a social commotion which
reacted very unfavourably as regards the efficient working of various
departments of his Chief's general administration.

In pre-Mutiny days in India an officer who could not carve meat and
fowl well had a very poor chance of such an appointment. Happily the
institution of _à la Russe_ fashions in the service of the table has
or many years past rendered such qualifications unnecessary.

To the regret of a very wide circle, the "loud, joyful and
steeplechasing Lord "--the late Lord William Beresford--alluded to by
Ali Baba, died in England in 1900. From 1875 to 1881 he was A.D.C. to
Viceroys of India, and it was in the "distant wars" of the Jowaki
expedition, 1877-8, in the Zulu War, 1879, where he gained the
Victoria Cross, and in the Afghan War, 1880, that his military career
was spent.

From 1881 to 1894 Lord William Beresford very ably served Viceroys of
India as their Military Secretary. Services which were admirably
summed up by a speaker on Dec. 30, 1893, when he was entertained at a
farewell dinner at the Town Hall, Calcutta, by 180 friends, who
declared that "he had raised the office to a science, and himself from
an official into an institution, and acquired a reputation absolutely
unique."

The voluminous and noteworthy annals of Indian sport can show no
keener sportsman and successful rider of steeplechases and polo
player. He won the Viceroy's Cup six times and many other principal
events at race-meetings in India.

In 1894 Lord William retired from India, and in England maintained a
renowned racing stable, being in addition one of the first to own
American horses and employ American jockeys.




No. 3



WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

An exceedingly important change affecting the power and functions of
the Indian Commander-in-chief, together with various other reforms in
the military administration of India, were all anticipated,
foreshadowed, and--it is believed--largely helped on by this very
paper, and others under the general heading of _Things in India_,
contributed by Ali Baba to _Vanity Fair_ during 1879.

Ali Baba, unlike some others that might readily be cited, would
doubtless have been foremost in according most generous
acknowledgments to the services in the cause of Indian Army reform,
rendered in past days by many great Commanders-in-Chief in India.

Chief among such men might be cited Sir Charles James Napier
(1782-1853), the conqueror of Scinde, who in 1849 returned to India,
nominated by the Duke of Wellington to deal with the crisis caused by
the Sikh campaign. Arriving in Calcutta on the 6th May, he at once
assumed the command, the term of service of Lord Gough, who had
brought the campaign to a successful end, being concluded. Napier's
too short administration of little over eighteen months was rather
judicial than military, but he effected many reforms on the parade
ground and in cantonments.

The newspapers of the day eagerly chronicled the records of the
proceedings in which he vigorously combated the vices of intoxication,
gambling, insubordination, and other crimes and misdemeanours, both in
officers and men of the Queen's and Company's forces alike.

It was during his command that separate barrack-room accommodation was
provided for married soldiers. The state of affairs hitherto
prevailing may well be imagined by an inspection of the barrack life
pictures and caricatures of artists such as Ramberg, Gillray,
Rowlandson, and others.

He also founded Soldiers' Institutes, and encouraged soldiers in the
Queen's army to rear such pets as monkeys and parrots by regulations
for their transport on route and transfer marches, which afforded
material for many humorous sketches and paragraphs in the pages of
_The Delhi Punch_. Wise and considerate regulations which are
continued in the existing concessions as to the carriage of "soldiers'
pets" by troop trains and homeward-bound Indian transports.

Colonel R.H. Vetch (_Dictionary of National Biography_) admirably sums
up Napier's character by recording of him that "his disregard of
luxury, simplicity of manner, careful attention to the wants of the
soldiers under his command, and enthusiasm for duty and right won him
the admiration of his men. His journals testify to his religious
convictions, while his life was one long protest against oppression,
injustice and wrongdoing. Generous to a fault, a radical in politics,
yet an autocrat in government, hot-tempered and impetuous, he was a
man to inspire strong affection or the reverse, and his enemies were
as numerous as his friends."

Altogether a very different character from that which all and sundry
are warned to avoid by the--to a great extent--satirical word-picture
recorded by Ali Baba.




No. 4



WITH THE ARCHDEACON

In this article Ali Baba has pourtrayed with infinite skill and
geniality the many-sided character of the late Joseph Baly, M.A., who
was Archdeacon of Calcutta from 1872 until he retired from India in
1883. Appointed to the Bengal Ecclesiastical establishment in 1861,
Mr. Baly served as Chaplain at Sealkote, Simla, and Allahabad until
1870, when, while on furlough in England, he acted as Rector of
Falmouth until 1872. In 1885 he was appointed chaplain at the church
in Windsor Park, built by Queen Victoria, in which appointment he died
in 1909, aged eighty-five.

From the commencement of his Indian career the Reverend gentleman
interested himself in that burning question of the employment of the
Anglo-Indian and Eurasian community of India; a large indigenous and
permanent element in the population, the disposal of which is still a
question of very great public importance, and its practical solution a
pressing necessity. The Archdeacon had this question, paraphrased by
Ali Baba as that of the "Mean Whites," greatly at heart, and the
conclusions he arrived at and suggestions made by him from time to
time, ably and vigorously summarized in a paper he read before the
Bengal Social Science Association on May 1st, 1879, in Calcutta, were
productive of considerable good.

Archdeacon Baly's predecessor was the Venerable John Henry Pratt, an
attached friend of Aberigh-Mackay's father, to whom his book, _From
London to Lucknow_, published in 1860, was "affectionately inscribed."
Certain traits in the character of this Archdeacon known to Ali Baba
by tradition are pourtrayed in the concluding portion of the paper.




No. 5



WITH THE SECRETARY TO GOVERNMENT

This article is of a composite nature. At the time it was published in
1879, the foreign policy of Lord Lawrence was a burning question, and
in connection with the Afghan War then running its course, renewed
attention was directed to the two essays, "Masterly Inactivity" and
"Mischievous Activity," first published in _The Fortnightly Review_ in
December 1869, and March 1870, respectively, by a comparatively young
Bengal Civilian, the late J.W.S. Wyllie, C.S.I. (1835-1870). Beyond
the fact that these essays and certain other papers by the same
brilliant author on the subject of the policy of the Indian Government
with independent principalities and powers beyond the bounds of India
were probably in Ali Baba's mind, the character of the supercilious
Secretary was very remote from that of Mr. Wyllie.

The typical person held up to derision by Ali Baba has been oft times
decried as one very detrimental to good government in India, where a
personal and absolute rule must needs obtain for some time to come. By
none more pointedly than by the present Secretary of State for India
when addressing his constituents at Arbroath on October 21, 1907, when
he informed them that "India is perhaps the one country--bad manners,
overbearing manners are very disagreeable in all countries--India is
the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political
crime." Or, as a prominent Mohammedan in India very well said, "When
the English govern from the heart they do it admirably; when they try
to be clever, they make a mess of it."

In the restored passage on p. 35 there is delineated a Secretary in
striking contrast to the other. The Secretary in the Foreign
Department referred to was the late Mr. le Poer Wynne, under whom
Aberigh-Mackay had worked at Simla in 1870.




No. 6



H.E. THE BENGALI BABOO

Ali Baba avowedly treats the Bengali Baboo merely as a being "full of
inappropriate words and phrases ... and the loose shadows of English
thought." Such being the case, it must never be forgotten that he is
the product, in every sense of the word, of British modes of purely
secular education. Modes which, eminently at the present time, are
being gravely called in question.

All of which has been more lately elaborated by "F. Anstey," _i.e._
Mr. Thomas Anstey Guthrie, in the persons of "Baboo Jabberjee, B.A."
and "A Bayard from Bengal."

The broad results of purely secular and mainly literary education
might in fact be quite fairly summed up in the reproachful words of
Caliban--

      "You taught me language; and my profit on't
      Is, I know how to curse."

Aberigh-Mackay devoted his life in India to counteract the effects of
purely literary instruction, which he persistently deprecated; and the
last thirty years have undoubtedly witnessed many advances in the same
direction, tending to the material progress of India.

Ali Baba trembled for the future of Baboodom, that its tendencies as
he depicted them might infect others who might pass, through various
stages, into "trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the
province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection."




No. 7



WITH THE RAJA

In this article we have a vivid picture--mainly--of a type of Indian
Noble it was Aberigh-Mackay's aim and life's work in India to avoid
creating. That too from the beginning of his career, but more
especially in the training, and that not merely in book-learning, he
initiated and earned on up to the last days of his life within and
without the Residency College at Indore. To paraphrase the language of
the then recently appointed Agent to the Governor-General for Central
India--Sir Lepel Griffin--in his first Administrative Report, that for
1880-1881, the happy effects of the training some of the leading
Chiefs of Malwa received under Aberigh-Mackay were visible in the
improved administration of their States. The most notable instance,
the Governor-General's Agent points out, being observable in Rutlam.
His Highness the "Rajah Saheb having conducted the Government with
such ability and success as would do credit to the ablest
administrators."

It is well worthy of special notice that the Rajah of Rutlam had been,
from a period several years antecedent to Aberigh-Mackay's coming to
Indore, his special ward.

Most effectually did Aberigh-Mackay, one of the best all-round
sportsmen that Modern India ever saw, counteract the "prodigiously fat
white horse with pink points" tendencies of any of his _alumni_. The
description of the kingly cavalcade in this article, _vide_ p. 52,
calling forth from John Lockwood Kipling _(Beast and Man in India_, p.
196), a most competent and discriminating authority, the following
eulogy:--

      "The late Mr. Aberigh-Mackay (Ali Baba of _Vanity Fair_),
      one of the brightest and most original, as well as one of
      the most generous spirits who ever handled Indian subjects,
      has drawn a picture in his _Twenty-one Days in India_ of a
      Raja and his Sow[=a]ri [Cavalcade] which could not be
      bettered by a hair's breadth."

Aberigh-Mackay in his earliest writings--_e.g._ when, in describing
_The Great Native Princes_ in his "Handbook of Hindustan," published
in 1875, he enters the "Remark" against the Nawab of Bahawalpur, "A
smart boy of fourteen; a good polo-player"--laid great stress on the
desirability of training all Indian noblemen's sons in horsemanship of
all kinds. That his efforts in this direction were crowned with an
abiding and ever-increasing success is well borne out by the testimony
contained in an article, by Lieutenant E.R. Penrose, 23rd Bengal N.L.
Infantry, accompanying his pictures of "Incidents in the Career of a
Polo-Pony," which appeared in _The Graphic,_ April 10, 1886.
Lieutenant Penrose then wrote:--

      "Polo is such an institution now in this country, that even
      in the remotest station a couple of enthusiasts may be found
      who will work heaven and earth to get a game of some sort. I
      have lately been stationed at Indore, where there is a
      collegiate school for the sons of native Princes and
      gentlemen. The head of the college was Mr. Aberigh-Mackay,
      the author of that popular book 'Twenty-one Days in India.'
      He was a keen polo-player, and quite imbued his pupils with
      his ardour, so that, though he is now dead, his memory is
      green throughout the whole of Central India. The impetus he
      gave the game has lasted, and consequently, with a few of
      the senior boys in the school, and some of the men of the
      troop of Central Indian Horse (who begin to play almost as
      soon as they can sit a horse), we could always get up a
      game. Some of the boys are not great riders, but like most
      natives they have wonderfully good 'eyes,' and rarely miss
      the ball. Polo-ponies come in very usefully in other
      ways--such as pig-sticking, for their training makes them so
      handy that it is easier to tackle a boar on a polo-pony than
      when mounted on a horse. Besides, they are cheap, and the
      men can afford a pony where they could not stand the expense
      of a horse."

Another very notable point in this article is the expression of
confidence in the loyalty, as a general rule, of the Nobles of India.
This same belief--nay more, _conviction_--is expressed all through the
writings of Ali Baba.

At the same time, voice is given to the thought that "they have built
their houses of cards on the thin crust of British Rule that now
covers the crater, and they are ever ready to pour a pannikin of water
into a crack to quench the explosive forces rumbling below," _vide_ p.
48.

Reuter, in a telegram from Calcutta dated Friday, February 11, 1910,
and printed in but _few_ of the London newspapers of the 14th, informs
us that:--

      "The leading Nobles and Gentry of Bengal have formed an
      Imperial League for the promotion of good feeling between
      Indians and the Government, the denunciation of anarchy and
      sedition, and the education of the people by means of
      lectures and pamphlets in the views of the Government.

      "The Maharajah of Burdwan is president, and Maharajah Sir
      Pradyat Tagore secretary of the new league."

It must of course be borne in mind that since this article was written
by Ali Baba, the formation of the Imperial Service troops, and the
Imperial Cadet corps, furnished and in some cases officered by Indian
Nobles and their sons, many of whom were educated at Delhi and Indore
by Aberigh-Mackay, surely warrants us in believing that more than a
mere "pannikin of water" is _now_ available, if need be.




No. 8



WITH THE POLITICAL AGENT

The position of Political Agent, important though it was in 1879, is
much more so now. The territories of the Indian Princes are being
daily opened up more and more by railways; many of them contain coal,
iron, gold, and other minerals in payable quantities, and the
development of these resources call for very delicate handling in the
matter of friendly advice by Political Agents.

In recent years, nay, at the present time, loud complaints have been
published, emanating from experienced and unbiassed sources, that the
position of many of the great feudatories of India, who by their
treaty rights are much more allies than subjects of His Majesty the
King-Emperor, has been reduced to that of a mere figure-head, with no
real authority except when they meekly obey the dictation of the
British Resident.

It is a fact that many of the Political Agents in 1879 were officers
who had served in Madras Cavalry Regiments, the Central India Horse
and other corps, but it is also a fact that many of the most
successful administrators India has ever seen have been
Soldier-Politicals.

Colonel Henderson, so pleasantly cited by Aberigh-Mackay, and happily
still alive, was himself a Madras Cavalry Officer, who served as
Under-Secretary to the Foreign Department of the Government of India,
as Resident in Kashmir and latterly in Mysore, and Superintendent of
operations for the suppression of Thagi and Dakaiti.

Our late King's visit to India as Prince of Wales in 1875-6 owed a
good deal of its success to Colonel Henderson, who was special officer
in attendance, and his services in connection therewith were
recognized by a Companionship of the order of the Star of India. It
may also be mentioned here that Aberigh-Mackay became his
Brother-in-law in October, 1873.




No. 9



WITH THE COLLECTOR

In this sketch, warm with local colour, the real pivot of the great
official wheel of Indian administration, "the Collector," is drawn
with the exactness due to his importance. Withal very lifelike and
picturesque in many of its touches.

Thirty years have of course made great changes in many of the details
of life in the districts of an Indian Province, now as a rule
connected up by lines of railway. Improved leave rules and many other
causes have rendered intercourse with the home country much easier.
Whether or no this far easier intercourse is altogether an advantage
to the rulers and the ruled is what is termed a "burning question" at
the present moment. In a word, that improved communications have not
correspondingly increased our sympathy with a new birth in intellect,
social life, and the affairs of state, all of which are mainly the
results of British rule.

The functions of a Collector, sketched by Ali Baba in an entertaining
medley, have increased enormously of late years, and the position is
now said to be less desirable than of old, when it was amusingly said
of every member of civilian society, that the verb "to collect" was
conjugated thus: "I am a collector, you are a collector, he should be
a collector, they will be collectors," and so on, _ad infinitum_.




NOS. 10, 20 AND 35



BABY IN PARTIBUS

This sketch, which may well be termed a beautiful lament over poor
Baby, has brought back vividly to many a one touching recollections: a
picture in fact which appealed, and continues to appeal, to an
audience infinitely wider than that of Anglo-India. The same may be
said of the sketches "The Grass-Widow," p. 139; "Mem-Sahib," p. 157,
by many considered the best sketch of all; and "Sahib," p. 181. All of
them full of that pathos and tenderness akin to, but yet differing
widely from, the bantering style of the others, which are also full of
allusions and covert references to individuals and affairs of the
Anglo-India of thirty years ago.

In "Sahib," however, there are traits of character and other touches
taken from the life of one who was--among many other features--a
"merry Collector," not yet forgotten by a rapidly decreasing circle of
contemporaries. While time and ameliorated conditions have changed the
"loathsome Indian cemetery" into something of a garden in which Ali
Baba our friend in common would have rejoiced.




No. 11



THE RED CHUPRASSIE

Alas! the Red Chuprassie is still a rift in the lute of Indian
administration; a reform in Chuprassies would doubtless be more
beneficial to India than any wonder-working _nostrum_--such as
Advisory Councils or extended Legislative Councils.

The cry for reform in Chuprassies, or in other words the underlings of
many Departments, is a very old one. Ali Baba's denunciation of the
"Red Chuprassie" powerfully expands that one by Sir Alfred Lyall,
where in his poem of _The Old Pindaree_, written in 1866, the "belted
knave" is associated with the "hungry retainers" and others forming
the camp establishment of an official on tour.

Ali Baba's practice of adequate payment, which he states--in a spirit
of banter--to be potent to remove temptation to bribery and
corruption, has received attention in connection with recent
ameliorations of the terms of subordinate service in India, and it is
believed has met with a certain amount of success.

The well-meant but not altogether satisfactory trial of the Gaikwar of
Baroda, by a mixed tribunal of Indian Nobles and highly placed British
officials, which took place during Lord Northbrook's viceroyalty, is
alluded to in the conclusion of the article; in which the Anglo-Indian
soubriquet for a subservient person--Joe Hookham, literally _jaisa
hukam_ = as may be ordered--is also introduced.




No. 12



THE PLANTER

It is now upwards of thirty years since this genial picture of a
veritable "Farmer Prince" was painted--in bold and broad outline, of
course. The years that have passed bringing in their train many
altered conditions, the most important of all, perhaps, being the
replacing of a natural vegetable dye such as indigo by chemically
produced substitutes.

Probably in a few more years the still remaining features of the
Bengal indigo planter's off duty life as depicted by Ali Baba will
have quite disappeared, unless the substitution of sugar planting for
that of indigo now receiving considerable attention in various Bengal,
and more particularly Tirhoot, districts prove a success.

Anyway, the Macdonalds, the Beggs, and the Thomases, names now, as
formerly, prominently identified with the great indigo industry, have
been assured of continual remembrance. So prominent, in fact, has the
Scotch element among planting families always been that it is said
that if any one present at a race, polo, or Christmas week gathering
were to shout out "Mac!" from the verandah of the Tirhoot Club, every
face in the crowd would be simultaneously turned towards the speaker.

The bantering allusion to "Mr. Caird and _The Nineteenth Century_,"
applies to that great authority on many and very varied agricultural
subjects, the late Sir James Caird, who died in 1892. In 1878-79 he
was deputed to India by the Secretary of State as a member of the
Indian Famine Commission called into being by the Strachey Brothers;
the general impressions then formed by a six months' tour through
India being embodied in the series of articles, entitled "Notes by the
Way in India; the Land and the People," which appeared from July to
October, 1879, in _The Nineteenth Century_ magazine, thereafter in
book form in 1883, and in an augmented form as a third edition in
1884.

For a detailed account of a Bengal indigo planter's life, mainly
confined, however, to the processes and surroundings of planting and
manufacture, there is no more valuable record than the late
Colesworthy Grant's well illustrated book, "Rural Life in Bengal,"
which was published in 1860. In that work may be found a drawing of
"Mulnath House," a glorified illustration of the fast disappearing
surroundings of a Lower Bengal planter's residence.




No. 13



THE EURASIAN

In November, 1879, when this "Study in chiaro-oscuro" was published,
renewed attention was being directed to the Eurasian community in
India, mainly by the discussions in all circles aroused by the
publication of the late Archdeacon Baly's Bengal Social Science
Association Paper of May in the same year, which dealt with the
employment, _inter alia_, of Europeans of mixed parentage in India; a
question which still engages the anxious consideration of many Indian
statesmen. Ali Baba's "Study" is not an ill-natured summary of the
widespread discussions of 1879, but indeed as far back as 1843, the
late John Mawson in his paper, "The Eurasian Belle," which first
appeared in the Calcutta newspaper, _The Bengal Hurkaru_, had
approached the social and domestic side of the question, and to some
extent may be said to have anticipated Ali Baba.




NOS. 14 AND 17



THE VILLAGER AND THE SHIKARRY

Both of these sketches are examples of what maybe termed Ali Baba's
contemplative mood, the villager's life being revealed to us in all
its pathos and interest, otherwise than through an atmosphere of
statistics and reports--the daily life of probably two hundred million
of the inhabitants of India.

Aberigh-Mackay early showed in his book "A Manual of Indian Sport,"
which, in addition to collecting in small compass lessons taught by
many a noted Indian hunter, contains a great deal of original matter
useful to every would-be sportsman, that he was well fitted to depict
"The Shikarry" in correct and graphic manner and from actual personal
knowledge.




NOS. 15 AND 16



THE OLD COLONEL AND THE CIVIL SURGEON

"The Old Colonel" and "The Civil Surgeon," p. 123, are both types of
characters that have since practically ceased to exist in India,
although fairly numerous in the 1870's.

"The Old Colonel," a relic of the great changes caused by the
disappearance of many regiments during the Indian Mutiny, and the
alterations in Army organisation due to the introduction of the "Staff
corps" system, has disappeared from the scene, having long since
attained the pensioned rank for which he was ripening when depicted by
Ali Baba.

As regards "The Civil Surgeon," an entirely new state of conditions
has altered him also. Even, however, in Ali Baba's time it could not
be said--as it was "long ago"--that a medical officer intended for an
Indian career, in order to become perfectly qualified need only sleep
one night on a medicine chest.

All the same, to those of us who can look back to life in India forty
or fifty years ago, there will surely arise visions of many genial old
colonels and doctors, full of good stories and much sympathy in health
or sickness for those just entering upon an Indian career.

Captain Atkinson, in his book "Curry and Rice," published at the lime
of the Indian Mutiny, depicted by pen and pencil individuals who in
after years developed into Ali Baba's subjects. Illustrations which
may now surely be regarded as valuable records of past Anglo-Indian
life and character.




NOS. 19 AND 21



THE TRAVELLING M.P. AND ALI BABA ALONE

"The Travelling M.P." requires no elucidation. He is still with us and
has developed greatly during the course of years, in fact, increased
facilities of communication between England and India have much
increased the species. Happily there are correctives in the shape of
adverse votes by constituents which, in some notorious instances at
the last Parliamentary elections, have relieved the situation.

As to "Ali Baba Alone," nothing could add to the perfect picture
which, among other things, good-naturedly alludes to many surmises and
rumours current at the time as to the identity of the Author, leading
in some cases to public disclaimers by various highly placed officials
and others.




THE TEAPOT SERIES



"SOCIAL DISSECTION" and "THE ORPHAN'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS"

These papers when first published in _The Bombay Gazette_ aroused keen
speculation as to their authorship. They are as applicable to Society
everywhere as to that of Anglo-India. Greatly appreciated all over
India, they were, with the others of the series, reprinted in book
form and published shortly before the Author's death in a volume,
entitled "Serious Reflections by a Political Orphan," which has long
been out of print.




"THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS"

The amiable and other idiosyncracies---personal and official--of the
late Sir Lepel Griffin, K.C.S.I., who, born in 1840, died on March 9,
1908, having retired in 1889 from the Bengal Civil Service, which he
entered'in 1860 by open competition, and of which he was a
distinguished ornament, are very well pourtrayed in this article. An
article of very tragic interest, because its publication was the
indirect cause, in all human probability, of the death of its Author.

This is not the place to recount Sir Lepel Griffin's career in many
high places of Indian administration and diplomacy, latterly more
particularly in the Punjab and Afghanistan.

Suffice it here to say that in 1880, when Chief Secretary of the
Punjab, a post he had then held for upwards of nine years--earning the
reputation of being the _best_ occupant of that very important and
responsible appointment ever known--Mr. (as he then was) Lepel Griffin
was selected by the Viceroy--Lord Lytton--to proceed to Kabul, and
arrange for its Government as a prelude to the termination of the
British occupation of Afghanistan.

Under the Viceroyalty of Lord Lytton's successor, the Marquess of
Ripon, and after anxious negotiations, Abdur Rahman was proclaimed
Amir of Afghanistan, July 22, 1880. In a spirit of thoroughly
good-natured banter the Gryphon's veritable "Expedition" from Lahore
to the seat of Government to receive the Viceroy's instructions, and
thereafter Afghanistan-ward to carry them out--made under very
different conditions from that one by Cyrus the younger--is amusingly
pourtrayed.

Travelling through the provinces then ruled over by the late Sir
George Couper and Sir Robert Egerton respectively, until finally Kabul
is reached, where Sir Frederick Roberts handed over his powers to the
Civil authority, as embodied in the Gryphon. A progress which, as
profusely chronicled by the correspondents of the innumerable
newspapers, British, Indian, and Foreign, attracted to India by the
second Afghan War, is lightly, yet not unkindly, satirized by
Aberigh-Mackay under the _nom de plums_ of "Your Political Orphan."
Who also in this article gave expression to the general impression of
the day, that by entrusting Mr. Lepel Griffin with the direct
negotiations, the position of the then Foreign Secretary to the
Government of India, Mr. (now Sir) Alfred Lyall had been somewhat
ignored.

Be this as it may, for his undoubtedly great services, in which he was
very greatly aided by his intimate acquaintance with the Persian
language, still the French of Afghanistan and other Central Asian
lands in diplomacy and etiquette, Mr. Griffin was created a K.C.S.I.,
and shortly afterwards appointed Governor-General's Agent in Central
India and Resident in Indore--where Aberigh-Mackay was Principal of
the Rajkumar College--the College for the "Sons of Nobles"--the first
"Eton" established under British rule in India. These appointments Sir
Lepel held from 1881 until 1888, when he was appointed Resident at
Hyderabad, the last official position he held in India.

The article now under elucidation appeared on March 29 1880, in _The
Bombay Gazette_, then edited by the late Mr. Grattan Geary, whose
narrative of a journey from Bombay to the Bosphorus through Asiatic
Turkey, published in 1878, did much to revive and stimulate interest
in those important countries, where happily British trade and other
influences are now being actively commented upon by the press of
Western India, and developed by the merchants of Bombay, Karachi, and
Western India generally.

Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, the proprietor of _Vanity Fair_, who had
always warmly appreciated the literary work done for him by
Aberigh-Mackay, about this time offered him the editorship of the
paper. This post Aberigh-Mackay had virtually accepted.

Shortly before Sir Lepel Griffin took up his appointment as
Governor-General's Agent, gossip, more especially at Indore and in
Central and Western India, was very busy with surmises as to the fate
in store for the writer of this article, as well as many other
paragraphs commenting, _inter alia_, upon Afghan affairs, and, _en
passant_ Mr. Lepel Griffin, which had appeared in _The Bombay Gazette_
from February to December, 1880, under the general heading of "Some
Serious Reflections." These articles, hitherto anonymous, having being
republished in book form, with their authorship avowed, at Bombay in
1880, shortly before the new Resident and Governor-General's Agent
arrived at Indore.

The gossips were--as is nearly always the case--quite wrong, for one
of the first men to extend a friendly welcome to Aberigh-Mackay when
he arrived at Lahore on the 13th August, 1869, to take up his
appointment of "Manager of the Government Zoological Collection" was
Mr. Lepel Griffin, then the Deputy-Commissioner of the City and
District.

Afterwards, at Simla and elsewhere, these two kindred spirits--in many
ways--met frequently, and learnt to understand each other thoroughly
well. They also had several common friends, civil, military, and
non-official; and their literary pursuits in historical directions
were also much in sympathy.

In 1881 they were not fated to meet, although Aberigh-Mackay had taken
immediate steps to endeavour to do so, as soon as he became aware that
a prevalent rumour was abroad to the effect that the Gryphon would--to
use a colloquialism--now make it hot for him.

Aberigh-Mackay indignantly repelled any such surmises, and laughed to
scorn the idea that Sir Lepel could possibly entertain any revengeful
thoughts of the kind that were anticipated by those who knew
absolutely nothing of the old and existing intimacies of either of the
two men concerned.

To effectually dispel and give the lie to all such insinuations, he
arranged to postpone his departure for England until after the arrival
of Sir Lepel Griffin at Indore, and then make patent to official and
other society the true inward state of affairs.

Aberigh-Mackay was a very keen all-round sportsman, and in the first
weeks of December, 1880, had played at Mhow and Indore in the
interesting polo matches between the 29th Regiment and the station of
Indore, both matches being won by Indore, notwithstanding a good fight
by the Regimental team, headed by Major Ruxton.

On the 7th January, 1881, he read and played with the Chiefs and
Thakores of the Rajkumar class of his College; on the evening of the
8th he played lawn-tennis in the Residency garden, when he caught a
chill. The next day--Sunday--symptoms of tetanus appeared which
created anxiety among his relatives and friends. On Tuesday, the 11th
January, signs of imminent danger became apparent, and at 11 a.m. on
Wednesday, he died, some weeks before the new Governor-General's Agent
arrived at Indore.

It is a very pleasing fact that the most eloquent and very evidently
heart-felt testimony to the great and abiding worth of Abengh-Mackay's
work at Indore and far beyond, came from the very pen of Sir Lepel
Griffin in his "Report of the Central India Agency for the Year
1881-82," issued in July, 1883, as follows.--

      'The death of Mr Aberigh-Mackay was for Central India, an
      almost irreparable loss. The patience, tact, and enthusiasm
      which he brought to his responsible educational duties were
      worthy of all admiration and those young Chiefs who had the
      benefit of his guidance will compare most favourably both in
      acquirements and manners with any students trained under the
      most favourable conditions in the colleges of British India.
      It so happened that at the time Mr Mackay was in charge of
      the Rajkumar College, a large number of important Chiefs
      were minors, including the Rajah of Rutlam, the junior Chief
      of Dewar, the Nawab of Jaora, and the two sons of His
      Highness the Maharaja Holkar. At present there are no Chiefs
      of the first rank in the Residency College. It will be well
      if the earnestness and devotion which animated the work of
      Mr. Abengh Mackay will be felt by those who succeed him.

In Elucidation No. 1--"The Viceroy"--Lord Lytton's _personal_
nomination of Abengh-Mackay to a Fellowship in the Calcutta University
has been referred to. This act of _noblesse oblige,_ in the highest
sense of the term, was happily known to Abengh-Mackay during his
lifetime.




"SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA"

In the autumn of 1880 many strange stories were afloat in India
concerning the studies and practices of what is now widely known as
occult science, indulged in and made manifest by the late Madame
Blavatsky, the authoress of _Isis Unveiled,_ who claimed to possess in
a high degree, by nature, those attributes which spiritualists
describe (without professing to understand) as "mediumship".

Prominent members of Anglo-Indian society associated themselves with
Madame Blavatsky, supported her, and believed in the _bona fides_ of
her powers, derived as Madame declared from Eastern "adepts" in the
science of Yog-Vidya, as this occult knowledge is called by its
devotees.

A science according to some--to others a mere vulgar imposition--with
which, as maintained by certain renowned Western exponents, Lord
Lytton was well versed and largely imbued, his _imagina-tive_ account
of the achievements accomplished by Vril in the _Coming Race_, being,
according to the school and scholars of Madame Blavatsky, altogether
inspired from that Eastern fount.

"Mr. Cypher Redalf, the eminent journalist," in the proper person of
Mr. A.P. Sinnett, editor of _The Pioneer_, a daily newspaper published
at Allahabad, and then, as now to an increased degree, the leading
English newspaper in India, printed in that journal an authoritative
statement of various occurrences in Blavatskyian circles at Simla when
Madame was on a visit to Mr and Mrs. Sinnett.

It is this statement, the outcome of "the true spirit of devout
inquiry ... by persons of consideration in evening dress" which forms
the _leit motif_ of Aberigh-Mackay's powerful satire, in which a
gingham umbrella, "conceived in the liberal spirit of a bye-gone age,"
is substituted for an old fashioned breast brooch set round with
pearls, with glass at the front and the back, made to contain hair,
which, long lost, was stated to have been recovered for its owner as a
result of Madame Blavatsky's occult powers.

Powers made manifest at a dinner in Mr. A.O. Hume's house at Simla on
Sunday the 3rd of October, 1880, at which were present as guests Mr.
and Mrs. Sinnett, Mrs. Gordon, Mr. F. Hogg, Captain P.J. Maitland, Mr.
Davison, Colonel Olcott, and Madame Blavatsky.

Most of the persons present believed that they had recently seen many
remarkable occurrences in Madame Blavatsky's company, and the
conversation largely turned on occult phenomena, in the course of
which Mrs. Hume was asked by Madame if there was anything she
particularly wished for. After some hesitation Mrs. Hume replied that
she was particularly anxious to recover an old-fashioned brooch she
had formerly possessed, which she had given away to a person who had
allowed it to pass out of her possession.

The brooch having been minutely described as above, and roughly
sketched, Madame then wrapped up a coin attached to her watch-chain in
two cigarette papers, and put it in her dress, and said that she hoped
the brooch might be obtained in the course of the evening.

At the close of dinner she intimated to Mr. Hume that the paper in
which the coin had been wrapped was gone. A little later, in the
drawing-room, she said that the brooch would not be brought into the
house, but that it must be looked for in the garden; and then, as the
party went out accompanying her, she stated that she had clairvoyantly
seen the brooch fall into a star-shaped bed of flowers. Mr. Hume led
the way to such a bed in a distant part of the garden, and after a
prolonged and careful search made by lantern light, a small paper
packet, consisting of two cigarette papers and containing a brooch
which Mrs. Hume identified as that which she had originally lost, was
found among the leaves by Mrs. Sinnett.

All this, and a great deal more, including the conviction of all
present that the occurrence was of an absolutely unimpeachable
character as an evidence of the truth of the possibility of occult
phenomena, being carefully embodied in the published statements, which
had been duly read over to the party and signed. The publication of
the statement aroused a great discussion in the newspapers of the day,
by no means confined to India, and gave a powerful impetus to Madame
Blavatsky's views.

Mr. Allan Octavian Hume, happily still alive, son of Joseph Hume the
great Radical member of Parliament, created C.B. for his very
distinguished services in the Mutiny, retired from the Indian Civil
Service in 1882 after a notable career in many departments.
Ornithologist, and since his retirement following hereditary instincts
by organizing and supporting the National Congress, and criticizing
much of the policy of the Government of India.

Mr. Sinnett, the leading actor in the affair described above, not long
after the publication of the Simla narrative, ended his connection
with _The Pioneer_, and may be regarded as one of the leading spirits
of the Theosophical movement, in connection with which he has written
many books, and he now holds high office in the London branch of the
Society.




NOTES



[A: _Lit. Great Ladies_, i.e. _Wives of Heads of Departments_.]

[B: _A genus of molluscous animals_.]

[C: _A primary constituent of matter._]

[D: _A slightly narcotic mixture_.]

[E: _Throne_.]

[F: _Hindu festivals in honour of the Ganges and the War God
     respectively_.]

[G: _Household._]

[H: _Official messengers._]

[I: _Lit. high-handed._]

[J: _Fairs._]

[K: _Table attendants_.]

[L: I have assumed the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in
    commemoration of the happy termination of the Afghan War.--A.B.]

[M: _Confirmed in the appointment_.]

[N: _Settlement of the land revenue_.]

[O: _Children_.]

[P: _Kitchen_.]

[Q: _Grooms._]

[R: The chuprassies are official messengers, wearing Imperial livery,
    who are attached to all civil officers in India.]

[S: _Civil servants_.]

[T: _An old English form of avaunt, begone!_ Vide "_Macbeth_," _I.
    iii. 6._]

[U: "_Bring me a brandy and soda._"]

[V: _Low-lying land_.]

[W: _News_.]

[X: _An arrangement, a plan_.]

[Y: _Criminal cases_.]

[Z: _Land revenue settlement_.]

[AA: _A water-carrier's leathern bag._]

[BB: _Chief Board of Land Revenue in the United Provinces_.]

[CC: _Equivalent to Sir._]





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