A CHRISTMAS DINNER ON A ROOF
IS it only three years ago that we ate our Christmas dinner on the roof
of an old Calcutta palace? How hot it was! The starlit sky was murky and
shimmering. The air trembled and throbbed with the electrical heat. But
when the plum-puddings came in we had to stop the punkah wallahs; the
swing of their big hand punkahs blew the flaming brandy out. The Major
had been saying nice things to me through all the courses. He was so
polite and attentive that he only had one of his Bombay oysters,—the
khitmatgar thought that his master did not want the others, and whipped
up the plate. He was a Madrassi, was the Major’s khitmatgar; he liked
oysters, and he had no stupid, superstitious theories about Europeans
defiling food. The Major never touched his sweetbread; and he missed
most of his _biscuit glacé_. Yes; he was self-sacrificingly courteous.
But when the hand punkahs stopped, he leaned back in his chair and drew
his handkerchief across his brow, with the air of a man who would
continue his polite attentions if he could, but really could not.
It was rather a home-sick little Christmas party. English people are
very apt to be home-sick when Christmas finds them out of England. We
two were not home-sick; we were the two strangers—the two newcomers;
and yet we were the most content of any there. We were nomads, gipsies,
strolling players. We had learned to carry our home in our
hand-satchels, and in our hearts. Our wandering life had broadened and
deepened our cosmopolitanism as much as it had sharpened and quickened
our patriotism. We had lived so often in a tent! and we thought that
palm-decked, star-canopied old roof the pleasantest possible place to
eat our Christmas dinner. I was especially happy. I always love to eat
in the open; and this old roof that lifted me high above the crooning
Calcutta streets, and seemingly half-way to the stars, had lifted me
into a warm, spicy atmosphere of high delight. It was a pretty scene.
The white-clad servants moved softly; the adjacent houses were very
quaint with minarets and intricate arches, strange latticed windows and
droll roof-gardens; the deep perfumes of Oriental flowers came up from
our host’s garden. Everything was richly Oriental except the table at
which we sat and feasted. That was as English as a very ingenious
hostess could make it. Great satin roses were woven in the damask of the
table linen; in the centre of the cloth lay a large silken Union Jack;
on it crouched a bronze lion; he was resting on a bed of roses. Around
the flag was a loose wreath of holly and mistletoe, and we each had a
bit of mistletoe at our plates. I saw the subaltern’s lip tremble a bit
when he put his sprig in his button-hole,—that was very weak and
babyish of him, was it not? Yet strangely enough that boy has won high
military honours since then. I was greatly interested in him at the
time, because he was the first subaltern I had met in India; and I had
heard so much about subalterns before I reached the East.
[Illustration: DELHI NAUTCH GIRL. _Page 56._]
The Major and his wife, our host and hostess, we had known well in
Italy. I had been delighted to dine with them; and now, that the dinner
was almost over, I was congratulating myself on having had so pleasant a
time.
The plum-puddings had caught properly, and the breath of the punkahs
came upon us again as a new sensation of delight. They fanned the
creaming wine until the ice tinkled against our thin glasses, until the
champagne frothed and bubbled in a perfect tempest of conviviality.
“Do you know the history of this old palace in which you are living?” I
asked the Major.
“No,” he said; “or at least very little of it. A mighty Nabob lived here
once. This roof garden, where we are now, he had made very lovely for
his favourite wife. She was of a higher caste than his. Her stepmother,
who hated her of course, had given the girl to the Nabob in the father’s
absence. The girl’s father had gone up to Peshawar, I believe, to buy
camels. It was a year or more after the Nabob’s marriage that the girl’s
father came back to Jullundar and found his favourite child gone. The
stepmother said the girl was dead; but the servants told the old man the
truth; so he killed his treacherous wife and came to Calcutta to find
his daughter. Well, he found her on this very roof. Now a Hindoo girl
who weds beneath her caste is degraded for ever,—she has become a
pariah, an outcast, and all her family are defiled. So the old
Brahmin—he was a Brahmin, of course—took out his knife and plunged it
through his daughter’s sari into her heart. And she cried ‘Salaam’ and
died; and he went away rejoicing.”
“But how did he get in, and how did he get out?” demanded the subaltern.
“Aren’t the women’s quarters in a Nabob’s palace better guarded than
that?”
“Sir, those are details, mere details,” snapped the Major. “Were you not
taught at Sandhurst that the subaltern is shot at sunrise who asks his
superior officer for details?”
The subaltern saluted (with a walnut shell in his fingers) and fell into
the conversational background.
“It is quite true, the story, Mr. Howard,” said the Major’s wife; “only
my husband is telling it so badly.”
The Major went on smoothly. “When Abdul came back——”
“Who was Abdul?” asked an exacting civilian.
“Abdul was the Nabob,” said our host curtly.
“Oh!” said the civilian, “I thought perhaps you meant my bearer; his
name is Abdul.”
“When Abdullah returned,” continued the Major, “and found his favourite
wife dead, he tore his beard and cast his turban at her feet. Then he
went into the women’s quarters—the part of the palace where the other
wives lived, for the dead girl-wife had had apartments of her own.
Abdullah had not been in the women’s quarters since his last and
happiest marriage. His wives gathered about him; they fell at his feet
and kissed them. He raised them up kindly. He gave them wine to drink,
and in each glass of wine he put three three-grained morphia pills. When
they had all fallen into the sleep from which he knew they could not
wake, he rose up and went, saying, ‘Allah, I had ceased to love them,
but I have killed them gently, that they shall feel no pain when they
burn upon my funeral pile.’ He went back to his dead girl-wife. He laid
a satin cushion beneath her head; he strewed sandal-wood dust upon her,
then he borrowed a scimitar from a eunuch and died.”
“I had no idea that the Hindoos were such good husbands,” said the
pretty American girl who sat on the other side of the subaltern.
“Might I be allowed to ask,” said the subaltern, “as a guest,
whether——”
But the Major’s wife had looked at me and smiled, and as we rose, he
jumped to his feet and rushed to the filmy portiere that hung across the
archway which topped the garden steps. They were broad, white, marble
steps, well called garden steps, for they led from the artificial roof
garden into the great wild place beneath, where mangoes and roses,
palms, ferns, and tuberoses crowded amongst the tangling wood-flowers of
Bengal.
“Gather all you want,” my hostess said, as I paused, spell-bound beside
a bed of strangely sweet flowers. “Gather all you like, but don’t ask me
the names.”
“Oh! I know what those are,” said the American girl who had come down
behind the rest of us. “They are mogree flowers. The nautch girls wear
them in their hair—I saw them at Amritzar. When the girls dance, the
flowers perfume the air; and if a very big man—high-caste or rich I
mean—comes in, they throw mogree flowers at him.”
We strolled on through the shapeless grounds,—we two Americans. She
pushed her pretty dimpled arm through mine. “Does it not seem very
strange to you to be ’way off here in India?” she asked me.
“My life has been so strange,” I said, “that nothing seems strange to
me, unless I am in a very thoughtful mood, and then life seems so
inexplicable that everything seems strange.”
We were standing by a funny little square basin of water. Oriental moss
broke the outlines of its marble sides. Strange coloured lilies slept
upon its breast. Here and there a lantern of Japanese silk dotted the
mangoe trees. Hattie tapped the warm marble with her little blue
slipper. “Isn’t it pretty!” said the girl, pointing with her big blue
eyes to the roof that we had left. It certainly was very pretty. Through
a break in the palm trees we could see our host and his men guests. They
were smoking, all of them, but they seemed rather thoughtful. Above
them, swung on invisible wires and on rope vines, were innumerable
Japanese and Chinese lanterns. My eyes lingered lovingly on the soft
yellows and the clear purples of the pretty illuminated paper balls.
Above all glittered the matchless stars. “I think that I should like to
live in India,” said the girl at my side, softly; “wouldn’t you?”
“I love my life almost anywhere,” I said, turning from the fountain to
pull a mogree flower. Then I kissed my young country-woman in the
moonlight. I regard kissing women as more to be condemned than giggling
girls and crowing hens. But some strange wave of tenderness welled over
me for the maiden at my side.
When the men and the coffee came down, sweet tinkling music crept to us
nearer and nearer from the shadow of the trees. A band of native
musicians had been engaged—for our sake I fear,—they were such an old
story to the Anglo-Indians there. I crept among the trees to examine
their barrel-like drums and their indescribable string instruments. Mine
host and mine husband followed me. We came back by the little lily pond.
The subaltern and the American girl were there, looking at the lilies so
intently that they did not see us.
“There is something remarkable about American women,” said my English
husband, with slow impertinence. “A man goes half mad until he gets an
American wife, and then he’d give half the world to get rid of her.”
“Yes,” said the Major, “I regard the influx of American women into the
British ranks as the chief danger that now threatens our forces. I do
not understand their apathy at the War Office, and at Westminster.”
I pelted my two tormentors with mogree flowers, and we went back to our
hostess, leaving the young people by the lilies.
It was very late. The native musicians had taken their big bukshish and
gone. A few faint streaks of light replaced the faded stars. It was
almost morning. We heard the tramp of men; we caught the martial rhythm
of a good old English carol. The privates of our host’s regiment were
coming (those of them who could sing) with the bandmaster at their
head—coming to serenade the major’s lady.
They sang with a right good will. When they broke into “Rule Britannia,”
the bird-like soprano of the pretty American girl rose shyly above the
strong heavy voices of the men. She had come back to the old mother
country, as so many American women do, led back by love. It was morning.
India seemed to have shaken off night, oppression, superstition, sorrow.
And as the full, big glory of the day broke, the soldiers stood at
attention and sang—with husky voices some of them, “God save the
Queen.” And in the distance, through the air, some one or something
breathed the dear old tune of “Home, sweet Home.”