PRESENTLY they met a wonderfully pretty lady with red cheeks, such red
cheeks as all the Miss Peacheys had in Canbury, being swung along in a
dandy on the shoulders of four stout coolies. The red cheeks belonged to
Chakrata; they were within half a mile of it then; they would see it
before the sun went down. The road zig-zagged a bit and climbed more
steeply, narrowing hideously here and there. The khuds became terrific.
Young Browne dismounted and walked at his wife’s bridle, pushing her
pony close to the mountainside. The precipices seemed to shout to them.
There was a last outstanding brown flank; the road hurtled round it,
over it, and then with the greeting of a mighty torrent of wind that
seemed to come from the other side of the world it ran out upon a wide
level place, where a band played and five hundred soldiers, in Her
Majesty’s red, wheeled and marched and countermarched, it seemed to the
Brownes, for pure light-heartedness. That was the end; there, grouped
all about a crag or two, was Chakrata. There across a vast heaving of
mountains to the horizon—mountains that sank at their feet and swelled
again and again and again purple and blue—stood the still wonder of the
Snows.
“They aren’t real,” said Helen simply, “they’re painted on the sky.”
The Brownes followed a path that twisted through Chakrata, and in course
of time they came to a little out-cropping wooden diamond-paned chalet,
with wide brown eaves that overhung eternity and looked toward the
Snows. It was a tiny toy dâk-bungalow, and English dahlias, red and
purple and yellow and white, grew in clumps and thickets tall and wild
around it. Here they entered in and demanded a great fire and a cake;
while a grey furred cloud, flying low with her sisters, blotted out the
Snows, and darkness, coming up from the valleys, caught them upon the
mountain-top.
Distinct and unusual joys awaited them in the morning. The fire had gone
out for one thing, and they shivered luxurious shivers at the prospect
of getting up without one. They enjoyed every shiver and prolonged it.
How little one thought of being thankful for that sort of thing in
England, Helen remarked, with little sniffs at the frosty air; and young
Browne said “No, by Jove,” and how one hated the idea of one’s tub. Oh,
delightfully cold it was, snapping cold, squeaking cold! Helen showed
her hands blue after washing them, and they tumbled through their
respective toilettes like a couple of school children. It was so long
since they had been cold before.
At breakfast the butter was chippy, and that in itself was a ravishing
thing. At what time of year, they asked each other, would butter ever
stand alone without ice in Bengal. And their fingers were numb—actually
numb; could anything have been more agreeable, except to sit in the sun
on the little veranda, as they afterwards did, and get them warm again!
There, without moving, they could watch that magical drifted white
picture in the sky, so pure as to be beyond all painting, so lifted up
as to be beyond all imagination. A ragged walnut-tree clung to the edge
of the cliff; the wind shook the last of its blackening leaves; the
vast, wheeling sky was blue and empty, except of the Snows, and the
dahlias had trooped to the verge to look, so that the sun shone through
their petals with the light of wine. It is their remoteness, their
unapproachableness, that make these Himalayan Snows a sanctuary. From
the foot of man anywhere they are prodigiously far off, so that they
look to him always the country of a dream just hanging above the world
he knows, or if he be of prayerful mind, the Habitation of the Holiness
of the Lord. And since it is permitted to us that by mountain and by
valley we may journey to look upon the Snows, even from very far off,
our souls do not perish utterly in India, and our exile is not entirely
without its possession.
The Brownes had only two days in Chakrata, which they employed chiefly
as I have mentioned—sitting in the sun devout before the Himalayas, or
ecstatically blowing upon their fingers. They made one expedition to see
a pair of friends whom the merciful decree of Providence had recently
brought up from the Plains for good, and found them laying in coal and
flour for the winter, which made them quite silent for a moment with
suppressed feeling. “I hope,” said young Browne flippantly, to conceal
his emotion, “that on the event of other stores giving out you have
plenty of candles. They are sustaining in an emergency.”
And as they made their thoughtful way on pony-back to the brown wooden
chalet, Helen observed upon her riding habit some clustering spots of
white, that multiplied and thickened, and she gathered them up between
her fingers with a delighted cry. “George, dearest, look! We’re being
_snowed on_—in India!”
All of which was doubtless very trivial, but they were not remarkable
people, these Brownes; from the first I told you so.
[Illustration: THE SNOWS.]
And though they found this journey of theirs brimful of the
extraordinary, the unparalleled, there was really only one remarkable
thing about it, which was the dignified and self-reliant conduct of the
ekka. The ekka had always gone before, overflowing with their goods and
crowned with Kasi in cross-legged pomp. They had traced its wavering
progress by ends of ravelled rope, and splinters of wood, and scraps of
worn-out leather which lay behind in the road to testify of it; and
grave as had been their apprehensions, they had never overtaken it in a
state of collapse. Invariably when they arrived they found the ekka
disburthened, tipped up under a tree, the ekka pony browsing with a good
conscience, Kasi awaiting with an air which asked for congratulation.
How it held together was a miracle which repeated itself hourly; but it
did hold together, and inspired such confidence in young Browne that he
proposed, when she tired of the Diagram, to deposit Mrs. Browne in the
ekka also. This, however, was declined. Mrs. Browne said that she had
neither the heart nor the nerves for it; in which case, of course, an
emergency would find her quite anatomically unprepared.
Leaving the Snows with grief, therefore, they left the ekka with
trusting faith. There had been a hitch in the process of packing,
examination, consultation. The sahib, inquiring, had been told that one
of the wheels was “a little sick.” It was an excellent ekka—an ekka with
all the qualities; the other wheel was quite new, and you did not often
find an ekka with an entirely new wheel! But the other was certainly a
little old, and after these many miles a little sick. Young Browne
diagnosed the suffering wheel, and made a serious report; there were
internal complications, and the tire had already been off seven times.
Besides, it wouldn’t stand up; obviously it was not shamming, the
_purana chucker_[141] was taken bad, very bad indeed. Its cure could be
accomplished, however, with wet chips and a hammer—and time. If the
sahib would permit, the ekka would follow in half an hour.
Footnote 141:
Old wheel.
So the Brownes departed gaily, and an hour and three-quarters later the
ekka tottered forth also, with Kasi and the ekka-wallah walking
lamentably alongside exchanging compliments upon the subject of the
wheel. They travelled three miles and an hour thus, and then the wheel
had a sudden relapse, with signs of dissolution; while young Browne’s
dressing-case, which happened to be on top, shot precipitately first
into space and then into the topmost branches of a wild cherry-tree
growing three thousand feet down the khud. The ekka pony planted his
feet in the road-bed and looked round for directions; the ekka-wallah
groaned and sat down. “And the sahib, O, my brother-in-law!” exclaimed
Kasi, dancing round the ekka.
“The sahib is in the hand of God!” returned the ekka-wallah piously.
“To-day I have been much troubled. I will smoke.” And while the Brownes,
at Saia, remotely lower down, grew chilly with vain watching in the
shadows that lengthened through the khuds, the weary ekka leaned
peacefully against the mountain wall, the ekka-wallah drew long comfort
from his hubble-bubble, and Kasi reposed also by the wayside, chewing
the pungent betel, and thinking, with a meditative eye on the wild
cherry-tree below, hard things of fate.
Nevertheless, without the direct interposition of Providence, the ekka
eventually arrived, and there was peace in one end of the dâk-bungalow,
and the crackling of sarl branches, and the simmering of tinned
hotch-potch. In the other end was wrath, and a pair of Royal Engineers—a
big Royal Engineer and a little Royal Engineer. To understand why wrath
should abide with these two Royal Engineers in their end of the
bungalow, it is necessary to understand that it was not an ordinary
travellers’ bungalow, but a “Military Works’” bungalow, their very own
bungalow, for “Military Works” and “Royal Engineers” mean the same
thing; and that ordinary travellers were only allowed to take shelter
there by special permission or under stress of weather. By their proper
rights, therefore, these Royal Engineers should have had both ends of
the bungalow, and the middle, and the compound, and the village, and a
few miles of the road north and south—and a little privacy. If these
ideas seem a trifle large, it becomes necessary to try to understand, at
least approximately, what a Royal Engineer is, where he comes from, to
what dignities and emoluments he may aspire. And then, when we have
looked upon the buttons which reflect his shining past, and considered
the breadth of his shoulders and the straightness of his legs, and the
probable expense he has been as a whole to his parents and his country,
we will easily bring ourselves to admit that he is entirely right in
considering himself quite the most swagger article in ordinary
Government service in India. We may even share his pardonable
incredulity as to whether before his advent India was at all. And
certainly we will sympathise with the haughtily impatient expletives
with which he would naturally greet pretensions to circumscribe his
vested rights in the Himalayan mountains on the part of two absurdly
unimportant and superfluous Brownes.
The Brownes in their end heard the two Royal Engineers kicking the fire
logs in theirs, and conversing with that brevity and suppression which
always marks a Royal Engineer under circumstances where ordinary people
would be abusively fluent. Apparently they had command of themselves,
they were Royal Engineers, they weren’t saying much, but it was vigorous
the way they kicked the fire. The Brownes were still as mice, and
absorbed their soup with hearts that grew ever heavier with a grievous
sense of wrong inflicted not only upon their neighbour but upon a Royal
Engineer!
“As a matter of fact, you know,” said young Browne, “we’ve no business
here. I think I ought to go and speak to them.”
“We’ve got permission,” remarked Mrs. Browne feebly, “and we were here
first.”
“I’m afraid,” said young Browne, “that we have the best end, and we’ve
certainly got the lamp. Maybe they would like the lamp. I think I ought
first to go and see them. After all, it’s their bungalow.”
Young Browne came back presently twisting the end of his moustache. It
was an unconscious imitation of the Royal Engineers acquired during
their short and embarrassed interview.
“Well?” said Helen.
“Oh, it’s all right. They don’t particularly mind. They accepted my
apology—confound them! And they _would_ like the lamp—their’s smokes.
They’re marching, like us, down to Saharanpore, inspecting the road or
something, and fishing. No end of a good time those chaps have.”
“What are their names?”
“Haven’t the least idea—they’re Royal Engineers.”
“Well,” returned Mrs. Browne disconsolately, “what are we to do when you
give them the buttie?”
“Go to bed,” returned her lord laconically.
Mrs. Browne prepared, therefore, for repose, and while Mr. Browne
yielded up the lamp there reached her from the other end of the bungalow
the ineffable condescension of a Royal Engineer, who said “Thanks
awfully.”
They were gone in the morning; the Brownes heard from the khansamah that
the burra-sahibs had departed at daylight, and the very burra of the
burra-sahibs rode a white horse. The Brownes were glad these
particularly burra-sahibs had gone; they found they preferred to be
entertained by the Military Works Department in the abstract. “They
probably mean to ride a long way to-day, starting so early,” said Helen
hopefully. “We won’t find them at Futtehpore.” It was unreasonable in
the Brownes; they had no grievance against these Royal Engineers, and
yet they desired exceedingly that somewhere, anywhere, their ways should
diverge; and there is no doubt whatever that the Royal Engineers would
have heartily recommended a change of route to the Brownes.
Unfortunately there was only one, and it lay before them unravelling
down among the hills to Futtehpore. It was such glorious cantering,
though, that these inconsiderable civil little Brownes on their bazar
tats, all agog with their holiday, almost forgot the possible recurrence
of the Royal Engineer. He became a small cloud on the horizon of their
joyous day; he would probably vanish before evening. So that the sun
shone and the doves cooed and the crested hoo-poe ran across the path,
of what import was a Royal Engineer—or even two? So the Brownes rode
valiantly down among the hills, she upon her Diagram and he upon the
charger of Rajpore, and when they really went with wings and glory, the
syce-boys running behind attached themselves to the tails of the Diagram
and the charger of Rajpore respectively, relieving their own legs and
adding greatly to the imposing character of the cavalcade. And so they
went down, down, where purple-veined begonias grew beside the course of
the springs, and tall trees fluttered their ghostly white leaves over
the verge, and orchids bloomed on dead branches up overhead. As they
went they met an invalid being taken to Chakrata for change of air and
scene. He rode in a dandy evidently made for his special accommodation,
carried by two coolies; and a chuprassie attended him, a beautiful
chuprassie with a red sash and a medal. The invalid looked at the
Brownes in a way that asked their solicitude, but he made them no
salutation because he was only a big brown and white mastiff, and
besides, he didn’t feel up to promiscuous conversation with strangers
who might or might not be desirable. But when young Browne stopped the
chuprassie and the coolies, and called him “old fellow” and asked him
where he was going and how he had stood the journey, he gave young
Browne a paw and a depreciating turn of his head over the dandy which
distinctly said, “Liver complications. We all come to it. Your turn next
hot weather. This country isn’t fit for a Christian to live in!” and one
more homesick alien passed on to look for his lost well-being in the
Hills. Mrs. Browne hoped he would find it, he was such a dear dog.
[Illustration: LIVER COMPLICATIONS—WE ALL COME TO IT.]
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