but Baby is a bad sleeper. The Bearer-in-waiting carries about a small
pillow all day long, and from time to time Baby is applied to it. He
frets and cries, and they brood over him humming some old Indian song,
["Keli Blai," or "Hillu Milli Pania"]. Still he turns restlessly and
whimpers, though they pat him and shampoo him, and call him fond names
and tell him soothing stories of bulbuls and flowers and woolly sheep.
But Baby does not sleep, and even Indian patience is exhausted. Both
Ayah and Bearer would like to slip away to their mud houses at the
other end of the compound and have a pull at the fragrant _huqqa_ and
a gossip with the _saices;_[Q] but while _Sunny Baba_ is at large, and
might at any moment make a raid on Mamma, who is dozing over a novel
on a spider-chair near the mouth of the thermantidote, the Ayah and
Bearer dare not leave their charge. So _Sunny Baba_ must sleep, and
the Bearer has in the folds of his waist-cloth a little black fragment
of the awful sleep-compeller, and Baby is drugged into a deep uneasy
sleep of delirious, racking dreams.
Day by day Baby grows paler, day by day thinner, day by day a stranger
light burns in his bonny eyes. Weird thoughts sweep through Baby's
brain, weird questions startle Mamma out of the golden languors in
which she is steeped, weird words frighten the gentle Ayah as she
fondles her darling. The current of babble and laughter has almost
ceased to flow. Baby lies silent in the Ayah's lap staring at the
ceiling. He clasps a broken toy with wasted fingers. His Bearer comes
with some old watchword of fun; Baby smiles faintly, but makes no
response. The old man takes him tenderly in his arms and carries him
to the verandah; Baby's head falls heavily on his shoulder.
The outer world lies dimly round Baby; within, strange shadows are
flitting by. The wee body is pressing heavily upon the spirit; Baby is
becoming conscious of the burthen. He will be quiet for hours on his
little cot; he does not sleep, but he dreams. Earth's joys and lights
are fast fading out of those resilient eyes; Baby's spirit is waiting
on the shores of eternity, and already hears "the mighty waters
rolling evermore."
The broken toys are swept away into a corner, a silence and fear has
fallen upon the household, black servants weep, their mistress seeks
refuge in headache and smelling salts, the hard father feels a
strange, an irrepressible welling up of little memories. He loves the
golden haired boy; he hardly knew it before. If he could only hear
once more the merry laugh, the chatter and the shouting! But he cannot
hear it any more; he will never hear his child's voice again. Baby has
passed into the far-away Thought-World. Baby is now only a dream and a
memory, only the recollection of a music that is heard no more. Baby
has crossed that cloudy, storm-driven bourn of speculation and fear
whither we are all tending.
A few white bones upon a lonely sand,
A rotting corpse beneath the meadow grass,
That cannot hear the footsteps as they pass,
Memorial urns pressed by some foolish hand
Have been for all the goal of troublous fears,
Ah! breaking hearts and faint eyes dim with tears,
And momentary hope by breezes framed
To flame that ever fading falls again,
And leaves but blacker night and deeper pain,
Have been the mould of life in every land.
Baby is planted out for evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery
that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died.
Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing
mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption.
Through sunshine and rain, through the long days of summer, through
the long nights of winter, for ever, for ever, Baby lies silent and
dreamless under that waving grass. The bee will hum overhead for
evermore, and the swallow glance among the cypress. The butterfly will
flutter for ages and ages among the rank flowers--Baby will still lie
there. Come away, come away; your cheeks are pale; it cannot be, we
cannot believe it, we must not remember it; other Baby voices will
kindle our life and love, Baby's toys will pass to other Baby hands.
All will change; we will change.
Yet, darling, but come back to me;
Whatever change the years have wrought,
I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee.
ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XI
THE RED CHUPRASSIE
OR, THE CORRUPT LICTOR[R]
[October 18, 1879.]
The red chuprassie is our Colorado beetle, our potato disease, our
Home ruler, our cupboard skeleton, the little rift in our lute. The
red-coated chuprassie is a cancer in our Administration. To be rid of
it there is hardly any surgical operation we would not cheerfully
undergo. You might extract the Bishop of Bombay, amputate the Governor
of Madras, put a seton in the pay and allowances of the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and we should smile.
The red chuprassie is ubiquitous; he is in the verandah of every
official's house in India, from the Governor-General downwards; he is
in the portico of every Court of Justice, every Treasury, every Public
Office, every Government School, every Government Dispensary in the
country. He walks behind the Collector; he follows the conservancy
carts; he prowls about the candidate for employment; he hovers over
the accused and accuser; he haunts the Raja; he infests the tax-payer.
He wears the Imperial livery; he is to the entire population of India
the exponent of British Rule; he is the mother-in-law of liars, the
high-priest of extortioners, and the receiver-general of bribes.
Through this refracting medium the people of India see their rulers.
The chuprassie paints his master in colours drawn from his own black
heart. Every lie he tells, every insinuation he throws out, every
demand he makes, is endorsed with his master's name. He is the
arch-slanderer of our name in India.
[He is not an individual--he is a member of a widely rammified
society.] There is no city in India, no mofussil-station, no little
settlement of officials far up country, in which the chuprassie does
not find sworn brothers and confederates. The cutcherry clerks and the
police are with him everywhere; higher native officials are often on
his side.
He sits at the receipt of custom in the Collector's verandah, and no
native visitor dare approach who has not conciliated him with money.
The candidate for employment, educated in our schools, and pregnant
with words about purity, equality, justice, political economy, and all
the rest of it, addresses him with joined hands as "Maharaj," and
slips silver into his itching palm. The successful place-hunter pays
him a feudal relief on receiving office or promotion, and benevolences
flow in from all who have anything to hope or fear from those in
power.
[Illustration: THE RED CHUPRASSIE--"The corrupt lictor."]
In the Native States the chuprassie flourishes rampantly. He receives
a regular salary through their representatives or vakils at the
agencies, from all the native chiefs round about, and on all occasions
of visits or return visits, durbars, religious festivals, or public
ceremonials, he claims and receives preposterous fees. The Rajas,
whose dignity is always exceedingly delicate, stand in great fear of
the chuprassies. They believe that on public occasions the chuprassies
have sometimes the power of sicklying them o'er with the pale cast of
neglect.
English officers who have become de-Europeanised from long residence
among undomesticated natives, or by the habitual performance of petty
ceremonial duties of an Oriental hue, employ chuprassies to aggrandise
their importance. They always figure on a background of red
chuprassies. Such officials are what Lord Lytton calls White Baboos.
[Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his own artless way, once proposed legislating
against chuprassies, I am told. His plan was to include them among the
criminal classes, and hand them over to Major Henderson, the
Director-General of Thuggee and Dacoity; but this functionary, viewing
the matter in a different light, made some demi-official
representation to the Legal Member under the pseudonym of "Walker,"
and the subject dropped.]
A great Maharaja once told me that it was the tyranny of the
Government chuprassies that made him take to drink. He spoke of them
as "the Pindarries of modern India." He had a theory that the small
pay we gave them accounted for their evil courses. A chuprassie gets
about eight pounds sterling a year. He added that if we saw a
chuprassie on seven rupees a month living overtly at the rate of a
thousand, we ought immediately to appoint him an _attaché_ or put him
in gaol.
I make a simple rule in my own establishment of dismissing a
chuprassie as soon as he begins to wax fat. A native cannot become
rich without waxing fat, because wealth is primarily enjoyed by the
mild Gentoo as a means of procuring greasy food in large quantities.
His secondary enjoyment is to sit upon it. He digs a hole in the
ground for his rupees, and broods over them, like a great obscene
fowl. If you see a native sitting very hard on the same place day
after day, you will find it worth your while to dig him up. Shares in
this are better than the Madras gold mines.
In early Company days, when the Empire was a baby, the European
writers[S] regarded with a kindly eye those profuse Orientals who went
about bearing gifts; but Lord Clive closed this branch of the
business, and it has been taken up by our scarlet runners or verandah
parasites, in our name. Now, dear Vanity, you may call me a
Russophile, or by any other marine term of endearment you like, if I
don't think the old plan was the better of the two. We ourselves could
conduct corruption decently; but to be responsible for corruption over
which we exercise no control is to lose the credit of a good name and
the profits of a bad one.
[Old qui-hyes tell you that there are three things you cannot separate
from an "Indian"--venality, perjury, and rupees. Now I totally
disagree with the old qui-hyes. In secret I am a great admirer of the
Indian, and publicly I always treat him with respect. I have such a
regard for him that I never expose him to temptation. I pay him well,
I explain to him my eccentric opinions about receiving bribes, and I
remind him of the moral and electrifying properties of the different
species of cane which Nature has so thoughtfully provided nearly
everywhere in India. The consequence is that my chuprassies do not
soil their hands with spurious gratifications, and figuratively
describe me as their father and mother.]
I hear that the Government of India proposes to form a mixed committee
of Rajas and chuprassies to discuss the question as to whether native
chiefs ever give bribes and native servants ever take them. It is
expected that a report favourable to Indian morality will be the
result. Of course Raja Joe Hookham will preside.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XII
THE PLANTER
A FARMER PRINCE
[Illustration: THE PLANTER--"A farmer prince."]
[October 25, 1879]
The Planter lives to-day as we all lived fifty years ago. He lives in
state and bounty, like the Lord of Burleigh. He lives like that fine
old English gentleman who had an old estate, and who kept up his old
mansion at a bountiful old rate. He lives in a grand wholesale manner;
he lives in round numbers; he lives like a hero. Everything is Homeric
about him. He establishes himself firmly in the land with great joy
and plenty; and he gathers round him all that makes life full-toned
and harmonious, from the grand timbre of draught-ale and the
organ-thunder of hunting, to the piccolo and tintinnabulum of Poker
and maraschino. His life is a fresco-painting, on which some Cyclopæan
Raphaelite has poured his rainbows from a fire-engine of a hundred
elephant-power.
We paltry officials live meanly in pen-and-ink sketches. Our little
life is bounded by a dream of promotion and pension. We toil, we
slave; we put by money, we pinch ourselves. We are hardly fit to live
in this beautiful world, with its laughing girls and grapes, its
summer seas, its sunshine and flowers, its Garnet Wolseleys and
bulbuls. We go moping through its glories in green spectacles,
befouling it with our loathsome statistics and reports. The sweet air
of heaven, the blue firmament, and the everlasting hills do not
satisfy our poisoned hearts; so we make to ourselves a little tin-pot
world of blotted-paper, debased rupees, graded lists, and tinsel
honours; we try to feed our lungs on its typhoidal effluvia. Aroint[T]
thee, Comptroller and Accountant-General with all thy grisly crew!
Thou art worse than the blind Fury with the abhorred shears; for thou
slittest my thin-spun pay-wearing spectacles, thrice branded varlet!
[There is a lily on my brow with anguish moist and fever-dew, and on
my cheeks a fading rose fast withereth too, and for these emblems of
woe thou shalt have to give an answer.]
Dear Vanity, of course you understand that I do not allude to the
amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the
mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my
own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment
when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury slinging
flame].
Let us soothe ourselves by contemplating the Planter and his generous,
simple life. It calms one to look at him. He is something placid,
strong, and easeful. Without wishing to appear obsequious, I always
feel disposed to borrow money when I meet a substantial Planter. He
inspires confidence. I grasp his strong hand; I take him
(figuratively) to my heart, while the desire to bank with him wells up
mysteriously in my bosom.
He lives in a grand old bungalow, surrounded by ancient trees. Large
rooms open into one another on every side in long vistas; a broad and
hospitable-looking verandah girds all. Everywhere trophies of the
chase meet the eye. We walk upon cool matting; we recline upon
long-armed chairs; low and heavy punkahs swing overhead; a sweet
breathing of wet _khaskhas_ grass comes sobbing out of the
thermantidote; and a gigantic but gentle _khidmatgar_ is always at our
elbow with long glasses on a silver tray. This man's name is Nubby
Bux, but he means nothing by it, and a child might play with him. I
often say to him in a caressing tone, "_Peg lao_";[U] and he is
grateful for any little attention of this sort.
It is near noon. My friend Mr. Great-Heart, familiarly known as "Jamie
Macdonald," has been taking me over the factory and stables. We have
been out since early morning on the jumpiest and beaniest of Waler
mares. I am not killed, but a good deal shaken. The glass trembles in
my hand. I have an absorbing thirst, and I drink copiously, almost
passionately. My out-stretched legs are reposing on the arms of my
chair and I stiffen into an attitude of rest. I hear my host splashing
and singing in his tub.
Breakfast is a meal conceived in a large and liberal spirit. We pass
from dish to dish through all the compass of a banquet, the diapason
closing full in beer. Several joyful assistants, whose appetites would
take first-class honours at any university or cattle show, join the
hunt and are well in at the beer. What tales are told! I feel glad
that Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Mary Somerville, and Dr. Watts are
not present. I keep looking round to see that no bishop comes into the
room. It is a comfort to me to think that Bishop Heber is dead. I gave
up blushing five years ago when I entered the Secretariat; but if at
this moment Sir William Jones were to enter, or Mr. Whitley Stokes
with his child-like heart and his Cymric vocabulary, I believe I
should be strangely affected.
The day welters on through drink and billiards. In the afternoon more
joyful Planters drop in, and we play a rubber. From whist to the polo
ground, where I see the merry men of Tirhoot play the best and fastest
game that the world can show. At night carousals and potations pottle
deep. Next morning sees the entire party in the _khadar_[V] of the
river, mounted on Arabs, armed with spears, hunting Jamie Macdonald's
Caledonian boar. These Scotchmen never forget their nationality.
And while these joyful Planters are thus rejoicing, the indigo is
growing silently all round. While they play, Nature works for them. So
does the patient black man; he smokes his _huqqa_ and keeps an eye on
the rising crop.
You will have learnt from Mr. Caird that indigo grows in cakes (the
ale is imported); to his description of the process of manufacture I
can only add that the juice is generally expressed in the vernacular.
You give a cake of the raw material to a coloured servant, you stand
over him to see that he doesn't eat it, and your assistant canes him
slowly as he squeezes the juice into a blue bottle. Blue pills are
made of the refuse; your female servants use aniline dyes; and there
you are. If any one dies in any other way you can refuse him the rites
of cremation; fine him four annas; and warn him not to do it again.
This is a burning question in Tirhoot and occasions much litigation.
Jamie Macdonald has now a contract for dyeing the Blue ribbons of the
Turf; Tommy Begg has taken the blue boars and the Oxford Blues; and
Bobby Thomas does the blue-books and the True Blues. It may not be
generally known that the aristocracy do not employ aniline dyes for
their blue blood. The minor Planters do business chiefly in blue
stockings, blue bonnets, blue bottles, blue beards, and blue coats.
For more information of this kind I can only refer you to Mr. Caird
and the _Nineteenth Century_.
Some Planters grow tea, coffee, lac, mother-of-pearl, pickles,
poppadums and curry powder--but now I am becoming encyclopædic and
scientific, and trespassing on ground already taken up by the Famine
Commission.
Fewer Planters are killed now by wild camels who roam over the mango
fields, but a good deal of damage is still done to the prickly
pear-trees. Mr. Cunningham has written an interesting note on this.
Rewards have still to be offered for dead tigers and persons who have
died of starvation. "When the Government will not give a doit to
relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."--
ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XIII
THE EURASIAN
A STUDY IN CHIARO-OSCURO
[Illustration: THE EURASIAN--"A study in chiaro oscuro."]
[November 1, 1879.]
The Anglo-Indian has a very fine eye for colour. He will mark down
"one anna in the rupee" with unerring certainty; he will suspect
smaller coin. He will tell you how he can detect an adulterated
European by his knuckles, his nails, his eyebrows, his pronunciation
of the vowels, and his conception of propriety in dress, manner, and
conduct.
To the thorough-bred Anglo-Indian, whose blood has distilled through
Haileybury for three generations, and whose cousins to the fourth
degree are Collectors and Indian Army Colonels, the Eurasian, however
fair he may be, is a _bête noir_. Mrs. Ellenborough Higgins is always
setting or pointing at black blood.
And sometimes the whitey-brown man is objectionable. He is vain, apt
to take offence, sly, indolent, sensuous, and, like Reuben, "unstable
as water." He has a facile smile, a clammy hand, a manner either
forward or obsequious, a mincing gait, and not always the snowiest
linen. [In very dangerous cases he has a peculiar smell.]
Towards natives the Eurasian is cold, haughty, and formal; and this
attitude is repaid, with interest, in scorn and hatred. There is no
concealing the fact that to the mild Gentoo the Eurasian is a very
distasteful object.
But having said this, the case for the prosecution closes, and we may
turn to the many soft and gentle graces which the Eurasian develops.
In all the relations of family life the Eurasian is admirable. He is a
dutiful son, a circumspect husband, and an affectionate father. He
seldom runs through a fortune; he hardly ever elopes with a young lady
of fashion; he is not in the habit of cutting off his son with a
shilling; and he is an infrequent worshipper in that Temple of
Separation where _Decrees Nisi_ sever the Gordian knots of Hymen.
As a citizen he is zealously loyal. He will speak at municipal
meetings, write letters about drainage and conservancy to the papers,
observe local holidays in his best clothes, and attend funerals.
The Eurasian is a methodical and trustworthy clerk, and often occupies
a position of great trust and responsibility in our public offices. He
is not bold or original, like Sir Andrew Clarke; or amusing, like Mr.
Stokes; but he does what work is given him to do without overstepping
the modesty of nature.
[Most Eurasians are Catholics; but some belong to the small Protestant
heresies and call themselves Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and what not.
To whatever creed they attach themselves, they are faithful and
devoted; but the pageantry, the music, the antiquity, and the mystery
of the ancient Church, draw forth, with the most potent spells, the
fervour of their warm, emotional natures. They are never sceptical:
the harder a doctrine is to believe the more they like it; the more
improbable a tradition is the more tenaciously they cling to it. They
are attracted by the supernatural and the horrible; they would not
bate a single saint or devil of the complete faith to rescue all the
truths of modern science from the ban of the Church.]
The Eurasian girl is often pretty and graceful; and, if the solution
of India in her veins be weak, there is an unconventionality and
_naïveté_ sometimes which undoubtedly has a charm; and which, my dear
friend, J.H----, of the 110th Clodhoppers (Lord Cardwell's Own
Clodhoppers) never could resist: "What though upon her lips there hung
the accents of the tchi-tchi tongue."
A good many Eurasians who are not clerks in public offices, or
telegraph signallers, or merchants, are loafers. They are passed on
wherever they are found, to the next station, and thus they are kept
in healthy circulation throughout India. They are all in search of
employment on the railway; but as a provisional arrangement, to meet
the more immediate and pressing exigencies of life, they will accept a
small gratuity, [or engage themselves in snapping up unconsidered
trifles]. They are mainly supported by municipalities, who keep them
in brandy, rice, and railway-tickets out of funds raised for this
purpose. Workhouses and Malacca canes have still to be tried.
Bishop Gell's plan for colonising the Laccadives and Cocos with these
loafers has not met with much acceptance at Simla. The Home Secretary
does not see from what Imperial fund they can be supplied with
bathing-drawers and barrel-organs; but the Home Secretary ought to
know that there is a philanthropic society at Lucknow of the
disinterested, romantic, Turnerelli type, ready to furnish all the
wants of a young colony, from underclothing to Eno's fruit salt.
A great many wise proposals emanate from Simla as regards some
artificial future for the Eurasian. One Ten-thousand-pounder asks
Creation in a petulant tone of surprise why Creation does not make the
Eurasian a carpenter; another looks round the windy hills and wonders
why somebody does not make the Eurasian a high farmer. The shovel hats
are surprised that the Eurasian does not become a missionary, or a
schoolmaster, or a policeman, or something of that sort. The native
papers say, "Deport him"; the white prints say, "Make him a soldier";
and the Eurasian himself says, "Make me a Commissioner, or give me a
pension." In the meantime, while nothing is being done, we can rail at
the Eurasian for not being as we are.
"Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men's bones
To a pale unanimity."
There is no proper classification of the mixed race in India as there
is in America. The convenient term _quadroon_, for instance, instead
of "four annas in the rupee," is quite unknown; the consequence is
that every one--from Anna Maria de Souza, the "Portuguese" cook, a
nobleman on whose cheek the best shoe-blacking would leave a white
mark, to pretty Miss Fitzalan Courtney, of the Bombay Fencibles, who
is as white as an Italian princess--is called an "Eurasian."
"Do you know, dear Vanity, that it is not impossible that King Asoka
(of the Edict Pillars), the 'Constantine of Buddhism,' was an
Eurasian? I have not got the works of Arrian, or Mr. Lethbridge's
'History of the World' at hand, but I have some recollection of
Sandracottus, or one of Asoka's fathers or grandfathers, marrying a
Miss Megasthenes, or Seleucus. With such memories no wonder they call
us 'Mean Whites.'"--ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XIV
THE VILLAGER