HOW WE KEPT HOUSE ON THE HILLS
WE lived for six months absolutely among the natives. Half of that time
my husband was not with us at all, but in Calcutta. The latter half he
was at home occasionally, but only occasionally, for he was working in
Bombay.
Nothing ordinary could have been more complete than our isolation from
Europeans. For months we saw no white faces but our own. It was not a
thrilling experience, because we were in no danger, we suffered no
inconvenience, and we could telegraph to Bombay at any moment. But it
was an interesting experience and a pleasant one. It was an experience
that taught one the value of books and the value of one’s self—if one
had any. It gave one calm and repose—calm and repose one could never
afterwards quite lose. For up there on the Indian hills one learned how
infinite Nature was, how irrevocable time and fate were, and how finite
self was!
The hills about Khandalah were more beautiful than grand. The jungles
were inexhaustible mazes of sweetness and beauty. Our own bungalow was a
delightful place. But it was not Nature that most satisfied and
entertained me. It was the people. The brown people—the common people
of Ind.
A woman—a woman whose mind and whose personality were on a larger scale
than mine—wrote to me from America, “What a privilege to be alone with
the mountains!” I held it more a privilege to be alone with the natives,
to study them, and to learn them, as I hope I did a little.
My stay in Khandalah increased wonderfully my already large respect for
the natives. My servants behaved beautifully. Each little duty was as
exactly performed as if we had been living _en régale_ in Calcutta or
Bombay. Every petty little Eastern ceremony was punctiliously performed.
Every meal was as formally served and as carefully prepared as if we had
been in Calcutta, and a dozen people coming to dinner. Each morning my
favourite flowers were freshly gathered into the vases. None of my likes
and dislikes were ever forgotten by my faithful brown friends. Ayah I
loved best of all. I used to abuse the dhursies, and fly into a weekly
fury with the dhobie. She was a wretch! The cook and I had sundry
squabbles, but I adored his dishes, and that made him adore me. Methu,
my own boy, was a perfect servant, save for a habit he had of stealing
beverage, and the mallie was a perfect mother to me.
I believe that I was once or twice unkind to the dhute wallah, but he
was always unkind to me; so I forgive myself.
Sambo crept slowly into my good graces; and I wish I had them, one and
all, here in London. I hope they are all hale and hearty in their pretty
hillside huts, and I send them my salaams.
We had incredibly little furniture in our bungalow, but we had a wealth
of pretty, filmy draperies. We had precious things from China and
Japan,—had them in cabinets well above the children’s heads. And our
garden was an Oriental paradise—a perfumed dream of plenty and of
matchless loveliness. I used to lie for hours in a hammock, watching the
stars, listening to the jackals, smelling the fresh ottar of the rose
trees, dreaming my woman’s dreams and perhaps companioning myself with a
cigarette, or perhaps my pet monkeys lay asleep in my arms. Sometimes my
hammock swung low with the added weight of my bairns; but not often at
night. They used to fall asleep with the sun; for from sunrise till
sunset they chased and rolled through the scented tangles of our
wonderful garden. They were always entirely safe, though great green
snakes and jackals were common, and panthers and tigers not over rare.
Our great dog never left them,—nor did Ayah nor Sambo. All those three
were faithful unto death, and Nizam, the dog, was decidedly clever.
I learned to read in Khandalah. I spent a great deal of my childhood in
my father’s library. I grew up among books, the spoiled child, the
companion of a booky man. But it was in Khandalah—alone on the Indian
hills, at the edge of the Indian jungle, that I learned how great is the
privilege of reading—that I learned to reverence books and to handle
them with devout fingers. I had many books with me. Some were old
friends; some had been selected for me by the best read man and the most
comprehensively minded I ever knew. But in Khandalah I learned even a
greater joy than the joy of reading. I learned the joy of living: I
learned what a privilege it is to live.
Yes, I who have always loved life, I across whose life an everlasting
shadow had fallen—the shadow of a little grave—learned in my hill
solitude what a good thing it was to be alive. I should not have liked
it for ever; but for six months it was ideal. “Could you have endured it
alone?” a friend has asked me. Ah! I don’t know. I had my babies, and
their nurse who is my dear friend, and sometimes I had my husband. I
fear that I could endure but little alone. I am not self-reliant. A few
nights ago I read in a London paper, “There is nothing on earth so
lonely as a lonely woman.” I think that I have never read anything
truer. I would rather be a confirmed invalid—yes, and a bedridden
one—than a lone woman. But if I were a lone woman (which, to be frank,
I can’t for a moment imagine myself) I would rather face my loneliness
alone, in just such an Indian bungalow—alone, but for native servants
and books and flowers and pet animals. I was not alone in Khandalah; but
society in every ordinary sense I had none. Yet I was never once lonely.
And when I ought to have gone to Bombay, I sent my nurse, and curled
myself up in my hammock.
It is a privilege to be alone with Nature. Yes, and it is also a
privilege, a great privilege, sometimes to be alone with one’s self.
Yes, it was a charming existence—ours at Khandalah. We were as free, as
untrammelled by artificialities, as out of the world, as if we had been
gipsies living in a tent. And yet we were as comfortable, our little
_ménage_ was as well ordered, as if we had been domiciled in the best of
hotels. Our omelets were always perfect; our gravies were never insipid;
our _pièce de résistance_ was always done to a turn; our _entrées_ were
always pretty, as well as toothsome; and our table was invariably a
thing of beauty.
If I raised my voice and said, “Boy,” some one answered, “Memsahib,” and
in a moment stood before me ready to obey. That was the acme of
civilisation, was it not? And yet all day I might lie on the grass if I
liked, and burrow in the sweet-scented ferns, and romp and roll with my
babies and our dog and our monkeys, forgetting that I was a matron and
ought to behave.
Oh, those days and those nights! We had no social obligations, no duties
save to satisfy our own natures and to love and cuddle and cherish two
babies. No care, save the care of trying to forget sorrow. No pain, but
the sweet pain, the pain sweeter than joy—the pain of remembering.
It was a selfish life—the life I led there. Sometimes my conscience,
which is usually the least troublesome friend I have, pricked me; then I
tumbled out of my hammock and trudged off, on charity intent, to the
little bazaar. In Khandalah, you can be a great philanthropist for
half-a-crown.
That is one of the chief joys of living in Asia. You can be so very good
at such a small cost.
We left our Khandalah bungalow even more suddenly than we had gone into
it. I lost my temper because the landlord sent a servant from Bombay to
strip one of the lemon trees, and omitted to say, “By your leave.” I
believe that the landlord was legally right; but the garden-wealth of
flower and fruit had been one of the great inducements to us when we
took the place, and the landlord broke his moral if not his legal bond
when he helped himself to his own lemons. At the time I was as nearly an
invalid as so aggressive a woman can be, and I had an invalid’s selfish
liking for those lemons. We had the only lemon trees in fruit for miles.
Limes are the common tart fruit in that part of the world. But limes are
one of the very few things tropical that I have never learned to love. I
detest them; and I heartily grudged my landlord his lemons. Our month
was almost “up.” “We’ll move,” I said.
“Where to?” asked my housekeeper.
“Anywhere,” I said. “But we’ll move to-morrow.”
And move we did. She, not I, accomplished it. I shall never know how she
did it. At daylight she left in a gharri. At noon she returned
triumphant. She had rented a bungalow at Lanaulie.
We packed in three hours; at least, every one but I packed. Packing is a
useful occupation, and I never, by any chance, do anything useful. It
was a wonderful day. My lucky husband was in Bombay. Three big bullock
carts were loaded with our goods and chattels. When the last blanket
load of et ceteras had been more or less securely fastened on to the
cart, when our last chicken had been caught and placed a crowing crown
upon the apex of the highest load, we started amid the wailings of the
mallie and the metrani, who were the only servants who were not to
accompany us. The mallie belonged body and soul to the landlord, and the
metrani was not a favourite of mine. I led the procession. I was in a
rather inelegant barouche, and my four-year-old son accompanied me.
“Wadie” and baby and Ayah brought up the rear in another and more
inelegant barouche. They were guarding the luggage—or thought they
were. The men servants walked beside the bullock carts and were supposed
also to protect my belongings.
Our new domicile was about three miles from our old. We arrived at our
destination about six. The others arrived about eight. My son and I
spent the interim in gazing upon our new domain, in being fairly decent
to the extremely civil Goanese house-agent, and in getting
preposterously hungry.
At eight o’clock the train drew near the bungalow gate. Ned and Cissy,
my pet monkeys, were screaming wrathfully, my baby was asleep, and my
aforesaid goods and chattels looked very dilapidated and shaken. We
extemporised a bed for baby, and found a loaf of bread for the monkeys.
The coolies hurled my ignominious parcels ignominiously to the ground;
and the patient oxen stood placidly in the flood of swiftly come
moonlight, which magnified and silvered their big, white beauty.
Our new abode was far more elegant—far less picturesque—than our old.
Our new garden was a young, methodical thing. Our bungalow was
systematically divided into proportional rooms, and over every door were
panoramas of coloured glass. They were sectioned into monotonous
squares, but the cruel reds, the crude greens, the impossible purples,
and the magnificent yellows, would have told us that we were in Asia,
had we not already known it.
It was nearly ten o’clock when the last cart had been unloaded and
driven away. Then we discovered that we had almost nothing to eat. The
hampers that had been hastily filled from our Khandalah larder had
disappeared. It was too late to send to the bazaar. Fortunately one of
the gharries was still waiting, as the gharri wallah and I had had a
slight difference of opinion _re_ remuneration. When I found that we
stood upon the verge of midnight and famine, I yielded to the
charioteer, on condition that he should drive, and drive quickly, with
the house-agent, who had volunteered to see what he could gather
together for us in the way of food. He came back in about three-quarters
of an hour with several loaves of bread, two dozen eggs, and seven or
eight seers of rice. In the meantime, the mistree had borrowed “curry
stuff” from the mallie, and had killed a chicken. We had put the babies
to bed, after giving them a huge supper of bread and milk and bananas.
It was almost midnight when they called me to dinner. “I’m almost
starved, Wadie,” I said, “and so thirsty. I hope they have cooled the
beer.” Alas, they had not—for the very good reason that there was no
beer to cool! It had been stolen with the baskets of food. I had to
drink water with my curry, and water does not go well with curry. I was
very angry that night, and vowed European vengeance upon the coolies who
had stolen all our fresh vegetables, a cask of oysters, a pigeon pie, a
dozen other viands, and, worse than all, my beer. But in the morning,
when we found that they had taken nothing but food and drink, I forgave
them. To confess the whole depth of my moral obliquity, I have never
been able to regard the stealing of food as wrong. Good people have
often told me that my moral sense is diseased. Perhaps it is, for I am
far more apt to regard the man who goes hungry a fool, than to regard
the man who steals bread a thief. So I laughed in the morning, and wired
to my husband, who was in Bombay, “Have moved to Lanaulie. All food has
been stolen. Send everything on next train.”
The night of our arrival, when we had finished our midnight dinner, I
told the servants that they could have all the food in the house. They
ate until daylight—caste or no caste. Sambo told me the next
morning—told me with tears in his eyes—that he had never before had
three eggs at once. I remember how much rice and how many plantains they
ate, for it was really phenomenal. But I will not tell you, for you
might not credit it. I venture to mention the little item of bread. The
five ate eight loaves of bread!
Lanaulie was not so pretty a place as Khandalah, but it was very lovely.
There were a few Europeans in Lanaulie, but we lived some distance from
any one. My nearest European neighbour and my only European friend was
my physician—a charming man.
We had been in Lanaulie only a few days when my landlord came from
Bombay to see me. He was a high-caste Hindoo gentleman, and will always
remain my beau ideal of a landlord. I thought that he had come for his
rent when the boy brought me his card, but he had not. He had come to
ask if we were comfortable, and to bring up a car-load of things that
would, he thought, make the bungalow more home-like to Europeans. Wasn’t
that nice of him? I believe that the place we had rented was his chief
pride. We were only able to get it, because the death of a prominent
member of his family having occurred in Bombay, Hindoo etiquette obliged
the entire family to remain in Bombay through a long period of mourning.
My landlord was a most interesting man and a large-minded one. His wife,
whom I never met, was a strict observer of caste. She felt rather badly
that Europeans were in their country house. Her dining-room was not in
the house; but, in the Hindoo fashion, in an outer house. This room was
locked from us by the mistress’s order, and in this dining-room were
stored her Lares and Penates, namely, their cooking utensils and their
chattees and their silk robes. Rigid high-caste Hindoos put on a silk
garment before they eat. My landlord was far less conservative than his
wife. He often had afternoon tea with us, and was kindly ready to
explain to me any of their puzzling customs.
No strict Brahmin eats meat. I know a prominent Hindoo gentleman who
used, with his son, to steal into the Lanaulie Hotel or even to the Dâk
Bungalow, and in a private room have a hearty meal of meat. Father and
son did it slyly, not because of public opinion, which they valued at
about its real worth, but to save the feelings of the Hindoo wife and
mother, who would have been in despair had she known that they ever ate
meat.
I often shut my eyes and dream that I am back on my verandah at
Lanaulie. I see the bhistie and his bullock come through the flowers to
beg. The bhistie wants pice and the pretty bullock wants bread and
fruit. They get both. The bhistie salaams—the bullock rubs his nose
against my shoulder, and they go slowly, patiently back to their
never-ending work. I see the sun set behind the splendid hills, I smell
the world of roses that stretches about my door. A thousand fire-flies
glitter in the grass. The big stars come out, the jackals call in the
jungle, and now and then they scurry across our garden. I am holding a
baby in my arms—a little baby that was born in Lanaulie.