IN Dehra the Brownes were within sight of the promised land, not always
but often. Sometimes it lay quite hidden in some indefinable matted
cloud-region of the sky, and then the last of the September rains came
pelting down the Doon. Sometimes it thrust only a shoulder out of its
cloud garments, and sometimes white fleeces swept over it from morning
till night. But there were other days when the clouds sailed high above
it, trailing their shadows after them, and then indeed the Brownes could
climb to it by a winding road that began at their very feet. The road
ascended to Mussoorie, which twinkled white on a spur above them seven
thousand feet up, and twelve miles off. It would have been perfectly
easy and practicable for them to go to Mussoorie; so easy and
practicable that they didn’t go. When young Browne had looked after the
planter’s tea-bushes, and put a headstone to his grave, and settled his
bills and written home to his people the details of his affairs, there
were eight days over. Mussoorie, the particular paradise of “quiet”
people and retired old gentlemen who mean to die in the country, was an
insignificant achievement for eight days. The Brownes surveyed the great
brown flanks of the hills and burned for a wider conquest. They would go
to Chakrata, high in the heart of the Himalayas to the west, half way to
Simla. They would ride on horseback all the way up and down again to the
railway station at Saharanpore; it would be more than a hundred miles—an
expedition, as young Browne remarked, that they could dine out on for
weeks when they got back to Calcutta. His own statement of their
equipment for the journey is succinct. “We shall want,” said he, “two
ponies, two syces, and an ekka. The ekka will take the luggage, bedding,
Kasi, and the tiffin-basket. The ponies will take us, and the syces will
come along behind. Let us go and hire them.”
They drove out the long shady main road of Dehra, creeping always upward
to Rajpore, upon this business, and on the way Mr. Browne explained to
Mrs. Browne the natural history, character and antecedents of the “bazar
tat.” “They run small,” said young Browne, “mostly ears and tails. They
have a tendency to displace objects to the rear of them, and a taste for
human flesh. They were born and brought up in the bazar, and their
morals are unspeakable. But you can’t get morals at any price in the
bazar; they are too expensive to be sold there. And there’s no real harm
in the bazar tat, if you only keep away from his heels and look a bit
spry when you get on.”
Mrs. Browne asked, with concealed anxiety, if there were no donkeys. She
was accustomed to a donkey, she said; she could ride one really rather
well, and if George didn’t mind she would so _much_ prefer it. But
George answered in a spirit of ribaldry. The only donkeys in India, he
said, belonged to the dhobies, and were permanently engaged in taking
home the wash. By that time they had arrived. It was only a sharp elbow
of a narrow mountain road, Rajpore, with its tumble-down houses,
overhanging it on both sides, and it was quite empty. “There aren’t any
horses here!” Helen remarked with disparagement.
“Wait,” returned her husband. Then, with really no particular emphasis,
he said, “Gorah!”[131] to Rajpore.
Footnote 131:
Horse!
“_Ha, hazur!_”
“_Good_ pony, sahib!”
“Here iz, memsahib—here iz!”
Rajpore human on innumerable pairs of brown legs, turned suddenly into
the best and most spacious of its ground floors, dragging thence Rajpore
equine hostile on four, wearing an aggrieved expression above clinging
strands of country grass. They came, and still they came, from above
trotting down, from below trotting up. A human being of sorts was
usually attached to them, but Rajpore was obviously inhabited by ponies.
No other census would have been worth taking there. Mrs. Browne was
surrounded by ragged turbans and man-eaters. With Mr. Browne’s anxious
hand upon her arm she felt herself precipitated in every direction at
once. “I can’t keep out of the way of _all_ their heels, George,” she
exclaimed in the voice of the tried woman, and then George backed her
carefully against a wall, drew a semicircle round her with a diameter of
five feet, and forbade man or beast to cross the line. Then they
proceeded to a choice.
“Here iz, hazur! Good nice thin wallah, memsahib _kawasti_!”[132]
Footnote 132:
For the memsahib.
“Thanks,” said Helen; “he’s a diagram! I want a fat one.”
“Look, memsahib! This one _bote_ plenty fat. _Rose_, _rose_, tarty
bun’nles ghas _khata_!”[133]
Footnote 133:
Day by day he eats thirty bundles of grass!
“He’s a baote-tamasha-wallah,” remarked young Browne. “Look at his eye,
Helen. He also appears to have kicked all his skin off his fetlocks. For
you I should prefer the diagram.”
Finally it was the diagram for Helen, who commanded that an unreasonable
quantity of food should be given to it under her eyes, and remained
until it was finished. “If she isn’t fatter after that,” she said with
satisfaction, “it’s her own fault.” Young Browne selected the veritable
charger of Rajpore. He wore his mouth and nose carefully tied up in
rope, and might be relied upon at all points so long as that one
remained secure. “They’re not much of a pair,” said young Browne, “but
in _your_ animal, dear, I don’t mind sacrificing both speed and
appearances.”
“To safety. Yes, dear, you are _perfectly_ right.” And Mrs. Browne,
whose sense of humour was imperfectly developed, regarded her husband
with affection.
Thereafter it became a question of an ekka, and Rajpore had ekkas
bewildering in their variety and in their disrepair. If you have never
seen an ekka it will be difficult for you to understand one. The
business ekka does not stand about to be photographed, and therefore you
must be told that, although it appears to rest mainly on the horse’s
back, it has two wheels generally, one on each side. There is a popular
saying that no sahib likes a one-wheeled ekka, and though it is a
popular saying it is true. The vehicle will do prodigious distances with
one wheel, but it is anticipating Providence to engage it on that basis.
An ekka is rather like a very old two-storied birdcage tilted up and
fore-shortened, with a vaulted roof, and it runs in my mind that the
roof is frescoed. The upstanding little posts at the four corners are
certainly painted red and yellow; they are carved also, like the rungs
of certain chairs. I know that the ekka-wallah sits in the upper story
smiling upon the world. An ekka-wallah always smiles; his is a life of
ease. I know too that there are bulgings above and protuberances below,
and half a yard of dirty sacking, and seven pieces of ragged rope, and
always room for something else; but at this point my impression becomes
a little confused, and I cannot state with assurance which end is
attached to the horse. That, however, is a matter of detail. The real
point is that the Brownes found an ekka apparently two feet square,
which contracted to carry their luggage, bedding, tiffin-basket, and
Kasi up to Chakrata and down to the plains for the sum of three rupees
per diem, which was extortionate. But the _pulthans_[134] were moving
down, and the sergeants’ wives would require many ekkas. They could
afford to wait for the sergeants’ wives. In expectation of these ladies
the ekka market was a solid unit and the Brownes succumbed before it.
Footnote 134:
Regiments.
Next day they left Dehra, dropping the first of its October rose-leaves.
Thinking of the planter in his grave, Helen wondered how he could have
been so indifferent as to close his eyes wilfully and intentionally on
such a place. It was the morning, there was a sweet and pungent gaiety
in the air, the long road they had to travel stretched before them in
the pleasaunce of leaf-checkered sunshine. Little striped squirrels
played on the boles of the trees—they were English-looking trees—that
met over their heads. Young Browne thanked God audibly that they were
out of the region of palms and plantains.
Tiny green fly-catchers swung on the rushes of an occasional pool,
pink-breasted ring-doves sidled out of their way, thieving parrots flew
by sixes and sevens screaming up from the _kharif_ crops.[135] Very
green were the _kharif_ crops, with the rain still about their roots,
surging up under the lowest branches of the trees as far as these
travellers could see before them. But for the teeming luxuriance of
everything, the sense of breadth and brightness and the caressing sun,
it might have been a road in Devonshire. But for the wayfarers too.
There were neither smocks nor gigs; the ryot went by, chiefly dressed in
his own brown skin, urging his lean oxen; all the gentle cows had
curious humps between their shoulders. And here by the wayside they saw
the tiny dome of a battered white praying place, and there the square
slab of a Mahomedan tomb.
Footnote 135:
Cold weather crops.
The sun grew hot as they scrambled with the road down to the bridge
across a broad river bed full of round white stones and boulders, with a
narrow shallow brown stream hurrying along the middle. Further away it
trickled into the Jumna; here it played with pebbles and crabs, but now
and then in the rains it brought the boulders down from the mountains
swirling, and threw stones at the Department of Public Works, and shook
the bridges. Looking one way as they crossed the bridge, it was a
piled-up picture, the blue hills massed behind, the big white stones
huddled and stranded in the glistening grey sand, the foolish little
stream in the middle. Looking the other, the picture went to pieces, the
hills sloped further away, the sky came down, the big stones rounded
themselves into little ones, and spread indistinguishably far. Either
way it was beautiful in the crisp Indian sunlight; it had a gay
untroubled life, like porcelain.
After that there were miles of irresponsible curving, weedy road, that
led them sometimes past the sirkar’s[136] sarl forest, and sometimes
past a little village gathered together under a mango-tree, but oftenest
it straggled through wide, sunny, stony country, full of pale
half-tints, where only wild grasses grew. Such tall wild grasses, purple
and yellow and white, bending and tufting above their heads on either
side of the way. “They would make Aunt Plovtree happy for life,” Helen
said. They would indeed, and many another estimable lady resident in
Great Britain. It was a sorrowful waste that they should be growing
there far from the solemn interiors that yearned for their dusty charms.
Helen was so much of this opinion that she dismounted and gathered a
bunch, compelling her husband to do the same, to send by parcel post to
Aunt Plovtree. She flicked the flies off the Diagram’s ears with them
for three miles, then she lost a third of them in a canter, and young
Browne arranged that the rest should be carefully forgotten at Kalsi
dâk-bungalow. He was of opinion that in undertaking an ascent of nine
thousand feet on a bazar tat in India you couldn’t be expected to gather
and preserve wild grasses for your aunt in England.
Footnote 136:
Government’s.
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