MY FIRST ’RICKSHAW RIDE
MY husband would not ride in a jinrickshaw, nor did he wish me to do so.
Of course, I was curious—very curious—to know how it felt to be rushed
along, drawn by a “human horse.” He thought it wrong to use men in that
fashion, and would neither step into a jinrickshaw nor countenance my
doing so.
The night before we left Colombo it rained furiously. I suppose every
one feels caged, once in a while. I felt caged that night. I remember
walking up and down our long sitting-room, up and down, until my husband
laid aside his book and said, “What is the matter?”
“I want to go for a ’rickshaw ride,” I cried.
“In all this rain?”
“You know I love to be out in the rain——”
“I can’t let you go alone, and I will not ride in one of those cruel
carts.”
“I’ll take Nurse with me, if you’ll see that the ayah minds the
children.”
“All right. I don’t think it’s right; but if you do, I’ll go and get the
’rickshaws.”
I flew into the nursery, and encountered another obstacle. My nurse did
not approve of ’rickshaws either. She proposed a gharri ride. I told her
that I was going in a ’rickshaw, and that, if she didn’t come, I’d go
alone. She was incapable of letting me go alone; so she sighed and put
on her things.
Does every one in England know what a ’rickshaw is? Almost every one
ought by this. A ’rickshaw is not unlike a bath-chair. It is higher,
lighter, more comfortable. It is not pushed; it is pulled. A jinrickshaw
coolie runs between the two shafts, which he holds firmly in his hands.
We took two ’rickshaws. The manager of the hotel told the coolies that
they were to run for an hour, and bring us back at the end of that time.
How it poured! but I was delighted with the motion, and never ceased to
like it. They were very swift; they ran with an easy even gait. There
was all the pleasure of driving behind a spirited horse and none of the
responsibility. There were no reins to hold, no control to exercise. I
leaned back on my cushions and enjoyed myself. They were sure of foot
those brown runners; and I knew that though they ran never so swiftly
they would never run away. As for their personalities, they have less
personality than a horse. Their presence a few feet in front was no
intrusion. They were merely the naked steaming means toward an
exhilarating end of entrancing motion.
We rushed on and on, through the dark and the storm—such a soft, warm,
pleasant storm. At last the coolies stopped. They had brought us into
the cinnamon grove. I was glad to be there upon my last night in Ceylon.
While we sat and sniffed the sweet, languid, scented air, the coolies
rubbed each other down. Each carried over his shoulder a long towel-like
rag. With these they gave each other a good shampooing. They did not
withdraw into the shade or the shelter of the cinnamon trees. They
stayed where they were, as pet horses might have browsed by the near
way-side. The night was black; but the well-trimmed ’rickshaw lamps
flashed steadily upon the clearly revealed coolies, showing their brown
bodies red.
The rain fell in torrents. They seemed to like it; and as they towelled
off each other’s sweat, they lifted their faces to the descending drench
as tired horses might push their steaming flanks into a well found
stream.
They halted three minutes perhaps—perhaps fifteen. I don’t know. I was
thinking new thoughts, and one can’t measure thought with a tape
measure.
They wrung the human rain and the rain of heaven from their rags, and
started on their homeward run. My homeward run I should say, for they
slept beside their ’rickshaws beneath the stars, or, if it chanced to
rain, beneath their rickshaws. And I, who slept mostly in hotels, could
hear, if I woke in the watches of the night, the peaceful breathings of
my babies as they slumbered in an adjacent room.
The ’rickshaw coolies are not, I believe, blessed, or burdened, with
many babies. They rarely have means justifiant of marriage. And in the
Orient, marriage is more honoured in the observance than in the breach.
Then too they die young as a rule, these “human horses” of the East.
Consumption, in some one of its many deadly forms, cuts short their
perpetual racing after the petty cash of listless-legged Europeans.
When we reached the hotel, they whined for bukshish with the usual
mingling of cringing and of bullying. They were placidly oblivious of
all the fine thoughts they had enkindled in my mind. They were not even
curious as to what manner of woman I was, that I elected to ride through
the rushing rain. I have so often seen the wonder-look upon the stupid
face of a European coachman who has driven me aimlessly through the dark
or the wet. But on the intelligent faces of my first ’rickshaw coolies,
I saw nothing. Their feelings, their thoughts, were as locked from me as
mine from them. And not one of their thoughts was of me. To them, I
meant two rupees eight annas. No more, no less.
“Well?” said my husband.
“Well!” said I.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Oh yes! so much.”
“Didn’t you feel wicked?”
“A little. But that will wear off, I think.”
Wear off it did. I became an inveterate jinrickshawist.
Did I shorten the life of any coolie? I don’t know. I provided many a
coolie with an overflowing bowl of rice and curry, that made his life
momentarily very endurable.
Would they better live longer and be hungrier?
Can we give them other, better work?
Ah! those are questions for statesmen, not for women.
The next day, when we left our rooms in the early morning, we found
John, the Madrassi, waiting for us. We were taking him to Calcutta with
us, and he was all anerve to start. John was, with one exception, the
handsomest native man I ever saw. He was nearly six feet tall, and
carried himself with superb dignity. He was fastidiously devoted to his
own personal appearance, and we took great delight in his toilets. I
remember him so well, as he stood outside our door, in the pale November
dawn. He was dressed in the sheerest of white robes, or rather
draperies; the upper cloth was of soft native silk; he wore a huge
turban, snowy white, with one thin line of gold running through it; and
in his ears he wore two hoops of flashing rubies. John never developed a
desire to carry parcels, but it was his delight to carry our almost
two-year-old baby. What pictures they used to make! She was a big
dimpled baby, very white, with bright blue eyes and gleaming yellow
curls. John was as black as a Madrassi can be, which is very black
indeed; but he was always as spotless in his attire as baby Mona
herself.
A man said to my husband, “You must not allow your servant to wear such
turbans, nor, above all, to wear jewelry; and then at night he wraps a
really valuable cashmere shawl about his miserable shoulders. It is
shocking form.”
“My wife would be greatly annoyed if John dressed less picturesquely—”
began my husband.
“But it’s most disrespectful, my dear boy, don’t you know.”
“My wife is very disrespectful. That I know.”
I came along in time to hear the last few sentences.
“Dear Sir——,” I said, “don’t you know that wherever MacGregor sits is
the head of the table?”
“The natives must be kept down,” was all the reply vouchsafed me.
The _Kaiser-i-Hind_ sailed at eleven in the morning. I had a good cry at
nine o’clock—not because we were leaving Colombo, but because the
dhobie had left us no underclothing but rags. It was my first experience
with an Oriental washerman, and it grieved me. All the pretty, dainty
things that my babies had worn during the long voyage from Adelaide to
Colombo were ruined. Thorns and rocks had had more to do with that
washing than had soap and water.
As we were leaving the hotel, Andrew, who had been paid in full the
night before, and whom we had not expected to see again, arrived. He had
begged to go with us and had been refused. Now he had made one heroic
effort to carry his point. He had cut off his hair and broken his comb.
Having Europeanised himself so far, he seemed to feel that we were in
honour bound to take him with us. He even said to my husband that he
would put on trousers when we reached Calcutta. He couldn’t do so in
Colombo, because his wife was coming to see him off. He was
broken-hearted when he learned that we really would not take him. He
wept piteously on the pier and beat his breast. But his wife (she looked
about sixteen) seemed very happy that he was not to accompany us. I
thought that greatly to his credit, and gave her a rupee for no reason
at all, save that I had so few that one less did not matter.
The ship was very crowded,—she had just come from London. The native
merchants made the deck-crowd denser, and buzzed like flies in their
last frantic efforts to sell us something—anything. Each rupee that we
were taking away they felt a stain upon the record of their ingenuity
and salesmanship.
As Colombo faded from our sight, we planned to return there on our
homeward journey. But we said it doubtfully—we had learned that the
plans of nomads are uncertain and changeable; and we have not yet seen
Colombo again.
The _Kaiser-i-Hind_ was full of English people,—army people, civil
servants, and their contingent of memsahibs.
There were three Americans aboard beside myself.
I am often called a bad American. I certainly am not a rabid American.
At times I am a bitter American. When I am among a lot of nice English
people, and have the misfortune to meet the worst type of travelling
American, I wince.
One of the Americans on board was a man of whom all Americans are justly
proud; he is a soldier (with a great record), a gentleman, and a
scholar. But not all the soldiers that have ever come from West Point,
not all the scholars that have ever come from Harvard, not all the
gentlemen that have ever come from Virginia, could have wiped out our
national disgrace upon a boat that numbered among its passengers Mr. and
Mrs. Frank Hunter.
They had been married two months. Whatever inspired Americans of their
type to select the Orient as the scene of their honeymoon was, is, and
always will be, a dark mystery. But there they were, glittering
caricatures of our national life. There they were, amid a boat-load of
nice English folk.
Mr. Frank Hunter did not wear quite such loud clothes as many of the
Englishmen. But he wore them far more noisily. A magnified chess-board
is nothing to a certain type of English officer in “mufti.” But though
they make mistakes about their coats, they never blunder in their
behaviour, those English officers—English and Irish, Scotch and Welsh,
are they. But they are all gentlemen, in public at least.
Mr. Frank Hunter’s tailors were irreproachable; but his manners were
simply shocking,—and English people are so easily shocked. The English
people on the _Kaiser-i-Hind_ quite forgot that there was a nasty
something, called _mal-de-mer_. They were as sick as sick could be from
the unavoidable proximity of the Hunters. I say “sick” advisedly; no
other word would convey what I mean. Mrs. Hunter, on the whole, was
worse than her husband. He sometimes smoked—rather frequently, in fact.
When he smoked he was silent. Mrs. Hunter did not smoke. She was never
silent, or, if ever, then only in the still watches of the night, and no
one had the benefit of it—no one but Mr. Frank Hunter.
Mrs. Frank Hunter wore more diamonds at breakfast than all the other
women in the boat put together wore at dinner. She dressed for dinner,
but she dressed very high at the neck, which I thought a great
pity,—the dimples in her chin told me that her neck was sweetly pretty.
She gazed with prudish horror at the well controlled _décollete_ of the
English women. They gazed less openly, but quite as disapprovingly, at
her vulgar display of jewelry. The abuse hurled by Mr. and Mrs. Frank
Hunter upon the _Kaiser-i-Hind_ Commissariat was positively indecent. I
have been better fed at sea, several times. But the ceaseless comments
of the Hunters were far worse than the food. There was no escape from
the perpetual clatter of their tongues; but we were not forced to eat
the food. “Won’t I just be glad to see my nice new brown stone bungalow
on Fifth Avenue!” exclaimed the bride one night at dinner. “Won’t I have
something to eat though! Don’t your mouth water for batter cakes every
morning? And aren’t you half dead for butter-milk?” She was speaking to
me. I felt very angry, because she had hit upon something we had in
common. I am excessively fond of butter-milk; and, when we were
housekeeping in Australia, every Sunday morning that was cold enough, my
husband used to make me “batter cakes” if I were good. But I could not
bring myself to confess that I agreed with that horrid little American
in anything. So I said nothing. She persisted, “Isn’t America the nicest
place on earth? Don’t you just love it?”
“America is very nice in some respects,” I said softly; “and I should
love my native land dearly, if there were fewer Americans.”
Mrs. Hunter did not say much to me after that. But the relief was
slight. She talked incessantly to some one—to her husband if to no one
else, and her sharp little voice pierced to the utmost corner of the
deck. Oh! my sisters, can’t we be free without being vulgar? Can’t we
travel without becoming a reproach to our beautiful land?
One night I left the dinner table early. If I had stayed longer I should
have thrown something at Mrs. Frank Hunter, and that would not have
enhanced the women of America in the eyes of that boat-load of people. I
went on deck. The gentleman of whom I have spoken—the American soldier
who was the peer, at least, of any Englishman on board—was leaning
sadly over the rail. “Are you ill, General?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “but I am ashamed of being an American! Did you hear that
dreadful person trying to pick a quarrel with Colonel Montmorency, about
the relative merits of West Point and Sandhurst? I stood it until she
told him that her Uncle Silas was a major of militia and one of the best
soldiers in the States. Then I left.”
We sat down and tried to console each other. We planned to petition
Congress to regulate the class of Americans who travel. We have not yet
done so, but I do believe that it was a good idea.
Mrs. Hunter kept up her vulgar, impertinent, irritating remarks until we
anchored in Diamond Harbour.
The last time I ever saw her, she and her husband were standing on
Chowringhee, gazing at the maidan. She was ablaze with gems, as usual.
The natives doubtless thought her the European wife of a Rajah. They
are, I believe, the only class of European ladies who in India in the
day overload themselves with jewels.
“Frank darling,” she was saying, “it ain’t a patch to Central Park, is
it? And their old Government House, as they call it—it can’t hold a
tallow candle to the Capitol at Washington, can it now?”
I fled down Dhurrumtollah.