Famine Commissioners) "incredibiliter delector."
[November 8, 1879.]
I missed two people at the Delhi Assemblage of 1877. All the gram-fed
secretaries and most of the alcoholic chiefs were there; but the
famine-haunted villager and the delirium-shattered, opium-eating
Chinaman, who had to pay the bill, were not present.
I cannot understand why Viceroys and English newspapers call the
Indian cultivator a "riot." He never amounts to a riot if you treat
him properly. He may be a disorderly crowd sometimes; but that is only
when you embody him in a police force or convert him into cavalry. The
atomic disembodied villager has no notion of rioting, _ça-ira_
singing, or any of the tomfooleries of revolution. These pastimes are
for men who are both idle and frivolous. When our villager wants to
realise a political idea, he dies of famine. This has about it a
certain air of seriousness. A man will not die of famine unless he be
in earnest.
Lord Bacon's apothegm was that _Eating maketh a full man_; and it
would be better to give the starving cultivator Bacon than the report
of that Commission (which we cannot name without tears and laughter)
which goes to work on the assumption that _writing maketh a full
man_--that to write over a certain area of paper will fill the
collapsed cuticles of the agricultural class throughout India.
When [Sir Richard Temple] first started the idea of holding famines, I
proposed that he should illustrate his project by stopping the pay and
allowances of the Government of India for a month. But he did not
listen to my proposal. People seldom listen to my proposals; and
sometimes I think that this accounts for my constitutional melancholy.
You will ask, "What has all this talk of food and famine to do with
the villager?" I reply, "Everything." Famine is the horizon of the
Indian villager; insufficient food is the foreground. And this is the
more extraordinary since the villager is surrounded by a dreamland of
plenty. Everywhere you see fields flooded deep with millet and wheat.
The village and its old trees have to climb on to a knoll to keep
their feet out of the glorious poppy and the luscious sugar-cane.
Sumptuous cream-coloured bullocks move sleepily about with an air of
luxurious sloth; and sleek Brahmans utter their lazy prayers while
bathing languidly in the water and sunshine of the tank. Even the
buffaloes have nothing to do but float the livelong day deeply
immersed in the bulrushes. Everything is steeped in repose. The bees
murmur their idylls among the flowers; the doves moan their amorous
complaints from the shady leafage of pipal trees; out of the cool
recesses of wells the idle cooing of the pigeons ascends into the
summer-laden air; the rainbow-fed chameleon slumbers on the branch;
the enamelled beetle on the leaf; the little fish in the sparkling
depths below; the radiant kingfisher, tremulous as sunlight, in
mid-air; and the peacock, with furled glories, on the temple tower of
the silent gods. Amid this easeful and luscious splendour the villager
labours and starves.
Reams of hiccoughing platitudes lodged in the pigeon-holes of the Home
Office by all the gentlemen clerks and gentlemen farmers of the world
cannot mend this. While the Indian villager has to maintain the
glorious phantasmagoria of an imperial policy, while he has to support
legions of scarlet soldiers, golden chuprassies, purple politicals,
and green commissions, he must remain the hunger-stricken, overdriven
phantom he is.
While the eagle of Thought rides the tempest in scorn,
Who cares if the lightning is burning the corn?
If Old England is going to maintain her throne and her swagger in our
vast Orient she ought to pay up like a--man, I was going to say; for,
according to the old Sanscrit proverb, "You can get nothing for
nothing, and deuced little for a halfpenny." These unpaid-for glories
bring nothing but shame.
But even the poor Indian cultivator has his joys beneath the clouds of
Revenue Boards and Famine Commissions. If we look closely at his life
we may see a soft glory resting upon it. I am not Mr. Caird, and I do
not intend entering into the technical details of agriculture--"_Quid
de utilitate loquar stercorandi?_"--but I would say something of that
sweetness which a close communion with earth and heaven must shed upon
the silence of lonely labour in the fields. God is ever with the
cultivator in all the manifold sights and sounds of this marvellous
world of His. In that mysterious temple of the Dawn, in which we of
noisy mess-rooms, heated courts, and dusty offices are infrequent
worshippers, the peasant is a priest. There he offers up his hopes and
fears for rain and sunshine; there he listens to the anthems of birds
we rarely hear, and interprets auguries that for us have little
meaning.
The beast of prey skulking back to his lair, the stag quenching his
thirst ere retiring to the depths of the forest, the wedge of wild
fowl flying with trumpet notes to some distant lake, the vulture
hastening in heavy flight to the carrion that night has provided, the
crane flapping to the shallows, and the jackal shuffling along to his
shelter in the nullah, have each and all their portent to the
initiated eye. Day, with its fierce glories, brings the throbbing
silence of intense life, and under flickering shade, amid the soft
pulsations of Nature, the cultivator lives his daydream. What there is
of squalor, and drudgery, and carking care in his life melts into a
brief oblivion, and he is a man in the presence of his God with the
holy stillness of Nature brooding over him. With lengthening shadows
comes labour and a re-awaking. The air is once more full of all sweet
sounds, from the fine whistle of the kite, sailing with supreme
dominion through the azure depths of air, to the stir and buzzing
chatter of little birds and crickets among the leaves and grass. The
egret has resumed his fishing in the tank where the rain is stored for
the poppy and sugarcane fields, the sand-pipers bustle along the
margin, or wheel in little silvery clouds over the bright waters, the
gloomy cormorant sits alert on the stump of a dead date-tree, the
little black divers hurry in and out of the weeds, and ever and anon
shoot under the water in hot quest of some tiny fish; the whole
machinery of life and death is in full play, and our villager shouts
to his patient oxen and lives his life. Then gradual darkness, and
food with homely joys, a little talk, a little tobacco, a few sad
songs, and kindly sleep.
The villages are of immemorial antiquity; their names, their
traditions, their hereditary offices have come down out of the dim
past through countless generations. History sweeps over them with her
trampling armies and her conquerors, her changing dynasties and her
shifting laws--sweeps over them and leaves them unchanged.
The village is self-contained. It is a complete organism, protoplastic
it may be, with the chlorophyll of age colouring its institutions, but
none the less a perfect, living entity. It has within itself
everything that its existence demands, and it has no ambition. The
torment of frustrated hope and of supersession is unknown in the
village. We who are always striving to roll our prospects and our
office boxes up the hill to Simla may learn a lesson here:
Sisyphus in vita quoque nobis ante oculos est
Qui petere a populo fasces sævasque secures
Imbibit et semper victus tristisque recedit.
Nam petere imperium quod inanest nec datur umquam,
Atque in eo semper durum sufferre laborem,
Hoc est adverse nixantem trudere monte
Saxum quod tamen e summojam vertice rusum
Volvitur et plani raptim petit sequora campi.
In this idyllic existence, in which, as I have said, there is no
ambition, several other ills are also wanting. There is, for instance,
no News in the village. The village is without the pale of
intelligence. This must indeed be bliss. Just fancy, dear Vanity, a
state of existence in which there are no politics, no discoveries, no
travels, no speculations, no Garnet Wolseleys, no Gladstones, no
Captain Careys, no Sarah Bernhardts! If there be a heaven upon earth,
it is surely here. Here no Press Commissioner sits on the hillside
croaking dreary translations from the St. Petersburg press; here no
_Pioneer_ sings catches with Sir John Strachey in Council. But here
the lark sings in heaven for evermore, the sweet corn grows below, and
the villager, amid these quiet joys with which the earth fills her
lap, dreams his low life.--ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XV
THE OLD COLONEL
[Illustration: THE OLD COLONEL--"Ripening for pension."]
"Kwaihaipeglaoandjeldikaro"--_Rigmarole Veda._
[November 15, 1879.]
The old Indian Colonel ripening for pension on the shelf of General
Duty is an object at once pitiful and ludicrous. His profession has
ebbed away from him, and he lies a melancholy derelict on the shore,
with sails flapping idly against the mast and meaningless pennants
streaming in the wind.
He has forgotten nearly everything he ever learnt of military duty,
and what he has not forgotten has been changed. It is as much as he
can do to keep up with the most advanced thoughts of the Horse Guards
on buttons and gold lace. Yet he is still employed sometimes to turn
out a guard, or to swear that "the Service is going," &c.; and though
he has lost his nerve for riding, he has still a good seat on a
boot-lace committee.
He is a very methodical old man. He rises at an early hour, strolls
down to the club on the Mall--perhaps the Wheler Club, perhaps some
other--has his tea, newspaper, and gossip there, and then back to his
small bungalow, [where he turns out his servants for swearing parade.
Each one gets it pretty hot; and then breakfast]. After breakfast he
arrays himself for the day in some nondescript white uniform, and with
a forage cap stuck gaily on one side of his head, a cheroot in his
mouth, and a large white umbrella in his hand, he again sallies forth
to the Club. An old horse is led behind him.
Now the serious business of life again begins--to get through the day.
There are six newspapers to read, twelve pegs to drink,
four-and-twenty Madras cheroots to smoke, there is kindly tiffin to
linger over, forty winks afterwards, a game of billiards, the band on
the Mall, dinner, and over all, incessant chatter, chatter, old
scandal, old jokes, and old stories. Everyone likes the old Colonel,
of course. Everyone says, "Here comes poor old Smith; what an infernal
bore he is!" "Hulloa, Colonel, how are you? glad to see you! what's
the news? how's exchange?"
The old Colonel is not avaricious, but he saves money. He cannot help
it. He has no tastes and he draws very large pay. His mind, therefore,
broods over questions relating to the investment of money, the
depreciation of silver, and the saving effected by purchasing things
at co-operative stores. He never really solves any problem suggested
by these topics. His mind is not prehensile like the tail of the
Apollo Bundar; everything eludes its grasp, so its pursuits are
terminable. The old Colonel's cerebral caloric burns with a feeble
flicker, like that of Madras secretariats, and never consumes a
subject. The same theme is always fresh fuel. You might say the same
thing to him every morning, at the same hour till the crack of doom,
and he would never recollect that he had heard your remark before.
This certainly must give a freshness to life and render eternity
possible.
The old Colonel is not naturally an indolent man, but the prominent
fact about him is that he has nothing to do. If you gave him a
sun-dial to take care of, or a rain-gauge to watch, or a secret to
keep, he would be quite delighted. I once asked Smith to keep a secret
of mine, and the poor old fellow was so much afraid of losing it that
in a few hours he had got everybody in the station helping him to keep
it. It always surprises me that men with so much time on their hands
do not become Political Agents.
Sometimes our old Colonel gets into the flagitious habit of writing
for the newspapers. He talks himself into thinking that he possesses a
grievance, so he puts together a fasciculus of lop-sided sentences,
gets the ideas set straight by the Doctor, the spelling refurbished
by the Padré, and fires off the product to the _Delhi Gazette_
or the _Himalayan Chronicle_. Then days of feverish excitement
supervene, hope alternating with fear. Will it appear? Will the
Commander-in-Chief be offended? Will the Government of India be angry?
What will the Service say?
The old Colonel is always rather suspicious of the great cocked-hats
at head-quarters. He knows that to maintain an air of activity they
must still be changing something or abolishing something, and he is
always afraid that they will change or abolish him. But how could they
change the old Colonel? In a regiment he would be like Alice in
Wonderland; on the Staff he would be like old wine in a new bottle.
They might make him a K.C.B., it is true; but he does not belong to
the Simla Band of Hope, and stars must not be allowed to shoot madly
from their sphere. As to abolishing the old Colonel, this too presents
its difficulties, for Sir Norman Henry and all the celebrated
cocked-hats at home and abroad look upon the Indian Staff Corps as
Pygmalion looked on his Venus. They dote on its lifeless charms, and
(figuratively) love to clasp it in their foolish arms. [Now the old
Colonel is the trunk of this Frankenstein--to change the scene. So we
must not abolish the old Colonel.]
It is better to dress him up in an old red coat, and strap him on to
an old sword with a brass scabbard, that he may stand up on high
ceremonials and drink the health of the good Queen for whom he has
lived bravely through sunshine and stormy weather, in defiance of
epidemics, retiring schemes and the Army Medical Department. It is
good to ask him to place his old knees under your hospitable board,
and to fill him with wholesome wine, while he decants the mellow
stories of an Anglo-India that is speedily dissolving from view.
The old Colonel has no harm in him; his scandal blows upon the
grandmothers of people that have passed away, and his little
improprieties are such as might illustrate a sermon of the present
day. [A rabbit might play with him if there were no chutni lying
about.]
But you must never speak to him as if his sun were setting. He is as
hopeful as a two-year-old. Every Gazette thrills him with vague
expectations and alarms. If he found himself in orders for a Brigade
he would be less surprised than anyone in the Army. He never ceases to
hope that something may turn up--that something tangible may issue
from the circumambient world of conjecture. But nothing will ever turn
up for our poor old Colonel till his poor old toes turn up to the
daisies. This change only, which we harshly call "Death," will steal
over his prospects; this new slide only will be slipped into the magic
lantern of his existence, accompanied by funeral drums and slow
marching.
Soon we shall hardly be able to decipher his name and age on the
crumbling gravestone among the weeds of our horrible station
cemetery--but what matters it?
"For his bones are dust,
And his sword is rust,
And his soul is with the saints, we trust."
ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XVI
THE CIVIL SURGEON
"Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it."
[November 22, 1879.]
Perhaps you would hardly guess from his appearance and ways that he
was a surgeon and a medicine-man. He certainly does not smell of
lavender or peppermint, or display fine and curious linen, or tread
softly like a cat. Contrariwise.
He smells of tobacco, and wears flannel underclothing. His step is
heavy. He is a gross, big cow-buffalo sort of man, with a tangled
growth of beard. His ranting voice and loud familiar manner amount to
an outrage. He laughs like a camel, with deep bubbling noises. Thick
corduroy breeches and gaiters swaddle his shapeless legs, and he rides
a coarse-bred Waler mare.
I pray the gods that he may never be required to operate upon my eyes,
or intestines, or any other delicate organ--that he may never be
required to trephine my skull, or remove the roof of my mouth.
Of course he is a very good fellow. He walks straight into your
drawing-room with a pipe in his mouth, bellowing out your name. No
servant announces his arrival. He tramples in and crushes himself into
a chair, without removing his hat, or performing any other high
ceremonial. He has been riding in the sun, and is in a state of
profuse perspiration; you will have to bring him round with the
national beverage of Anglo-India, a brandy-and-soda.
Now he will enter upon your case. "Well, you're looking very blooming;
what the devil is the matter with you? Eh? Eh? Want a trip to the
hills? Eh? Eh? How is the bay pony? Eh? Have you seen Smith's new
filly? Eh?"
This is very cheerful and reassuring if you are a healthy man with
some large conspicuous disease--a broken rib, cholera, or toothache;
but if you are a fine, delicately-made man, pregnant with poetry as
the egg of the nightingale is pregnant with music, and throbbing with
an exquisite nervous sensibility, perhaps languishing under some vague
and occult disease, of which you are only conscious in moments of
intense introspection, this mode of approaching the diagnosis is apt
to give your system a shock.
Otherwise it may be bracing, like the inclement north wind. But,
speaking for myself, it has proved most ruinous and disastrous. Since
I have known the Doctor my constitution has broken up. I am a wreck.
There is hardly a single drug in the whole pharmacopoeia that I can
take with any pleasure, and I have entirely lost sight of a most
interesting and curious complaint.
You see, dear Vanity, that I don't mince matters. I take our Doctor as
I find him, rough and allopathic; but I am sure he might be improved
in the course of two or three generations. We may leave this, however,
to Nature and the Army Medical Department. Reform is not my business.
I have no proposals to offer that will accelerate the progress of the
Doctor towards a higher type.
Happily his surgical and medicinal functions claim only a portion of
his time. He is in charge of the district gaol, a large and
comfortable retreat for criminals. Here he is admirable. To some eight
or nine hundred murderers, robbers, and inferior delinquents he plays
the part of _maître d'hôtel_ with infinite success. In the whole
country side you will not find a community so well bathed, dressed,
exercised, fed and lodged as that over which the Doctor presides. You
observe on every face a quiet, Quakerish air of contentment. Every
inmate of the gaol seems to think that he has now found a haven of
rest.
If the sea-horse on the ocean
Own no dear domestic cave,
Yet he slumbers without motion
On the still and halcyon wave;
If on rainy days the loafer
Gamble when he cannot roam,
The police will help him so far
As to find him here a home.
This is indeed a quiet refuge for world-wearied men; a sanctuary
undisturbed by the fears of the weak or the passions of the strong.
All reasonable wants are gratified here; nothing is hoped for any
more. The poor burglar burdened with unsaleable "grab" and the
reproaches of a venal world sorrowfully seeks an asylum here. He
brings nothing in his hand; he seeks nothing but rest. He whispers
through the key-hole--
Nil cupientium
Nudus castra peto.
Look at this prisoner slumbering peacefully beside his _huqqa_ under
the suggestive bottle tree (there is something touching in his
selecting the shade of a _bottle_ tree: Horace clearly had no _bottle_
tree; or he would never have lain under a strawberry (and cream)
tree). You can see that he has been softly nurtured. What a sleek,
sturdy fellow he is! He is a covenanted servant here, having passed an
examination in gang robbery accompanied by violence and prevarication.
He cannot be discharged under a long term of years. Uncovenanted
pilferers, in for a week, regard him with respect and envy. And
certainly his lot is enviable; he has no cares, no anxieties. Famine
and the depreciation of silver are nothing to him. Rain or sunshine,
he lives in plenty. His days are spent in an innocent round of duties,
relieved by sleep and contemplation of [Greek: to on]. In the long
heats of summer he whiles away the time with carpet-making; between
the showers of autumn he digs, like our first parents, in the Doctor's
garden; and in winter, as there is no billiard-table, he takes a turn
on the treadmill with his mates. Perhaps, as he does so, he recites
Charles Lamb's Pindaric ode:--
Great mill!
That by thy motion proper
(No thanks to wind or sail, or toiling rill)
Grinding that stubborn-corn, the human will,
Turn'st out men's consciences,
That were begrimed before, as clean and sweet
As flour from purest wheat,
Into thy hopper.
Yet sometimes a murmur rises like a summer zephyr even from the soft
lap of luxury and ease. Even the hardened criminal, dandled on the
knee of a patriarchal Government, will sometimes complain and try to
give the Doctor trouble. But the Doctor has a specific--a brief
incantation that allays every species of inflammatory discontent.
"Look here, my man! If I hear any more of this infernal nonsense, I'll
turn you out of the gaol neck and crop." This is a threat that never
fails to produce the desired effect. To be expelled from gaol and
driven, like Cain, into the rude and wicked world, a wanderer, an
outcast--this would indeed be a cruel ban. Before such a presentiment
the well-ordered mind of the criminal recoils with horror.
The Civil Surgeon is also a rain doctor, and takes charge of the
Imperial gauge. If a pint more or a pint less than usual falls, he at
once telegraphs this priceless gossip to the Press Commissioner,
Oracle Grotto, Delphi, Elysium. This is one of our precautions to
guard against famine. Mr. Caird is the other.
[I was once in a very small station where our Civil Surgeon was an
Eurasian. He was a pompous little fellow, but a capital doctor,
gaoler, and metereologist.
"Omnis Aristippum decint, color et status, et res."
We liked him so much that we all got ill; crime increased, the gaol
filled, and no one ever passed the rain-gauge without either emptying
it or pouring in a brandy-and-soda. With women and children he was a
great favourite; for he had not become brutalised by familiarity with
suffering in hospitals. His heart was still tender, his voice soft,
and he had a gentle way with his hands. I never knew anyone who was so
unwilling to inflict pain; yet he was not unnerved when it had to be
done. But, poor little physician! he was not able to cure himself when
fever laid her hot hand on him. He tried to go on with his work and
live it down; but the recuperative forces of Nature were weak within
him, and he died. "The good die first, and those whose hearts are dry
as summer dust burn to the socket." Our cow-buffalo doctor is still
alive, I fear.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XVII
THE SHIKARRY
[November 29, 1879.]
I have come out to spend a day in the jungle with him, to see him play
on his own stage. His little flock of white tents has flown many a
march to meet me, and have now alighted at this accessible spot near a
poor hamlet on the verge of cultivation. I feel that I have only to
yield myself for a few days to its hospitable importunities and it
will waft me away to profound forest depths, to the awful penetralia
of the bison and the tiger. Even here everything is strange to me; the
common native has become a Bheel, the sparrowhawk an eagle, the grass
of the field a vast, reedy growth in which an elephant becomes a mere
field mouse. Out of the leaves come strange bird-notes, a strange
silence broods over us; it is broken by strange rustlings and cries;
it closes over us again strangely. Nature swoons in its glory of
sunshine and weird music; it has put forth its powers in colossal
timber and howling beasts of prey; it faints amid little wild flowers,
fanned by breezes and butterflies.
My heart beats in strange anapæsts. This dream world of leaf and bird
stirs the blood with a strange enchantment. The Spirit of Nature
touches us with her caduceus:--