with a brood of ducklings. They passed out of her element, and only
returned as hunger called them. When they did return she was all that
soap and water, loving reproaches, and tender appeals could be; and as
they were very affectionate little boys, they were for the time
thoroughly cleansed morally and physically, and sealed with the
absolution of kisses.
I saw her three years afterwards in England. She was living in
lodgings near a school which her boys attended. She looked careworn.
Her relations had been kind to her, but not warmly affectionate. She
had been disappointed with the welcome they had given her. They seemed
changed to her, more formal, narrower, colder. She longed to be back
in India; to be with her husband once more. But he was engrossed with
his work. He wrote short letters enclosing cheques; but he never said
that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, that she must
come out to him, or that he must go to her. He could not have grown
cold too? No, he was busy; he had never been demonstrative in his
affection; this was his way. And she was anxious about the boys. She
did not know whether they were really getting on, whether she was
doing the best for them, whether their father would be satisfied. She
had no friends near her, no one to speak to; so she brooded over these
problems, exaggerated them, and fretted.
The husband was a man who lived in his own thoughts, and his thoughts
were book thoughts. The world of leaf and bird, the circumambient
firmament of music and light, shone in upon him through books. A book
was the master key that unlocked all his senses, that unfolded the
varied landscape, animated the hero, painted the flower, swelled the
orchestra of wind and ocean, peopled the plains of India with
starvelings and the mountains of Afghanistan with cut-throats. Without
a book he moved about like a shadow lost in some dim dreamland of
echoes.
Everyone knew he was a scholar, and his thoughts had once or twice
rung out to the world clear and loud as a trumpet-note through the
oracles of the Press. But in society he was shy, awkward, and uncouth
of speech, quite unable to marshal his thoughts, deserted by his
memory, abashed before his own silences, and startled by his own
words. Any fool who could talk about the legs of a horse or the height
of the thermometer was Prospero to this social Caliban.
He felt that before the fine instincts of women his infirmity was
especially conspicuous, and he drifted into misogyny through
bashfulness and pride; and yet misogyny was incompatible with his
scheme of life and his ambition. He felt himself to be worthy of the
full diapason of home life; he desired to be as other men were,
besides being something more.
[Greek: Kakon gynaikes all' homos, o daemotai,
Ouk estin oikein oikian aneu kakou.
Kai gar to gaemai, kai to mae gaemai, kakon.]
So he married her who loved him for choosing her, and who reverenced
him for his mysterious treasures of thought.
There was much in his life that she could never share: but he longed
for companionship in thought, and for the first year of their married
life he tried to introduce her to his world. He led her slowly up to
the quiet hill-tops of thought where the air is still and clear, and
he gave her to drink of the magic fountains of music. Their hearts
beat one delicious measure. Her gentle nature was plastic under the
poet's touch, wrought in an instant to perfect harmony with love, or
tears, or laughter. To read aloud to her in the evening after the
day's work was over, and to see her stirred by every breath of the
thought-storm, was to enjoy an exquisite interpretation of the poet's
motive, like an impression bold and sharp from the matrix of the
poet's mind. This was to hear the song of the poet and Nature's low
echo. How tranquilising it was! How it effaced the petty vexations of
the day!--"softening and concealing; and busy with a hand of healing."
Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta,
Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per æstum
Dulcis aquæ saliente sitim restinguere rivo.
But with the advent of babies poetry declined, and the sympathetic
wife became more and more motherly. The father retired sadly into the
dreamland of books. He will not emerge again. Husband and wife will
stand upon the clear hill-tops together no more.
Neither quite knows what has happened; they both feel changed with an
undefined sorrow, with a regret that pride will not enunciate. She is
now again in India with her husband. There are duties, courtesies,
nay, kindnesses which both will perform, but the ghost of love and
sympathy will only rise in their hearts to jibber in mockery words and
phrases that have lost their meaning, that have lost their
enchantment.
"O love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?
"Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the raven on high;
Bright reason will mock thee
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
"From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter
When leaves fall and cold winds come."
ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XXI
ALI BABA ALONE
THE LAST DAY
"Now the last of many days,
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest, and the last is dead,
Rise, memory, and write its praise."
[December 27, 1879.]
How shall I lay this spectre of my own identity? Shall I leave it to
melt away gracefully in the light of setting suns? It would never do
to put it out like a farthing rushlight after it had haunted the Great
Ornamental in an aurora of smiles. Is Ali Baba to cease upon the
midnight without pain? or is he to lie down like a tired child and
weep out the spark? or should he just flit to Elysium? There, seated
on Elysian lawns, browsed by none but Dian's (no allusion to little
Mrs. Lollipop) fawns, amid the noise of fountains wonderous and the
parle of voices thunderous, some wag might scribble on his door, "Here
lies Ali Baba"--as if glancing at his truthfulness. How is he to pass
effectively into the golden silences? How is he to relapse into the
still-world of observation? Would four thousand five hundred a month
and Simla do it, with nothing to do and allowances, and a seat beside
those littered under the swart Dog-Star of India? Or is it to be the
mandragora of pension, that he may sleep out the great gap of _ennui_
between this life and something better? How lonely the Government of
India would feel! How the world would forget the Government of India!
Voices would ask:--
Do ye sit there still in slumber
In gigantic Alpine rows?
The black poppies out of number
Nodding, dripping from your brows
To the red lees of your wine--
And so kept alive and fine.
Sometimes I think that Ali Baba should be satisfied with the
oblivion-mantle of knighthood and relapse into dingy respectability in
the Avilion of Brompton or Bath; but since he has taken to wearing
stars the accompanying itch for blood and fame has come:--
How doth the greedy K.C.B.
Delight to brag and fight,
And gather medals all the day
And wear them all the night.
The fear of being out-medalled and out-starred stings him:--
[Consimili ratione ab eodem sæpe timore
Macerat invidia, ante oculos ilium esse polentem,
Illum aspectari, claro qui incedit honore,
Ipsi se in tenebris volvi cænoque queruntur
Insereunt partim statuarum et nominis ergo.]
Thus the desire to go hustling up the hill to the Temple of Fame with
the other starry hosts impels him forward. If you mix yourself up with
K.C.B.'s and raise your platform of ambition, you are just where you
were at the A B C of your career. Living on a table-land, you
experience no sensation of height. For the intoxicating delights of
elevation you require a solitary pinnacle, some lonely eminence. Aut
Cæsar, aut nullus; whether in the zenith or the Nadir of the world's
favour.
But how much more comfortable in the cold season than the chill
splendours of the pinnacles of fame, where "pale suns unfelt at
distance roll away," is a comfortable bungalow on the plains, with a
little mulled claret after dinner. Here I think Ali Baba will be
found, hidden from his creditors, the reading world, in the warm light
of thought, singing songs unbidden till a few select cronies are
wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears they heeded not--before the
mulled claret.
To this symposium the A.-D.-C.-in-Waiting has invited himself on
behalf of the Empire. He will sing the Imperial Anthem composed by Mr.
Eastwick, and it will be translated into archaic Persian by an
imperial Munshi for the benefit of the Man in Buckram, who will be
present. The Man in Buckram, who is suffering from a cold in his
heart, will be wrapped up in himself and a cocked hat. The Press
Commissioner has also asked for an invitation. He will deliver a
sentiment:--"Quid sit futurum eras fuge quærere." A Commander-in-Chief
will tell the old story about the Service going to the dogs; after
which there will be an interval of ten minutes allowed for swearing
and hiccuping. The Travelling M.P. will take the opportunity to jot
down a few hasty notes on Aryan characteristics for the _Twentieth
Century_ before being placed under the table. The Baboo will
subsequently be told off to sit on the Member's head. During this
function the Baboo will deliver some sesquipedalian reflections in the
rodomontade mood. The Shikarry will then tell the twelve-foot-tiger
story. Mrs. Lollipop will tell a fib and make tea; and Ali Baba
(unless his heart is too full of mulled claret) will make a joke. The
company will break up at this point, after receiving a plenary
dispensation from the Archdeacon.
Under such influences Ali Baba may become serious; he may learn from
the wisdom of age and be cheered by the sallies of youth. But little
Mrs. Lollipop can hardly be called one of the Sallies of his youth.
Sally Lollipop rose upon the horizon of his middle age. She boiled up,
pure blanc-mange and roses, over the dark brim of life's afternoon, a
blushing sunrise, though late to rise, and most cheerful. Sometimes
after spending an afternoon with her, Ali Baba feels so cheered that
the Government of India seems quite innocent and bright, like an old
ballerina seen through the mists of champagne and limelight. He walks
down the Mall smiling upon foolish Under Secretaries and fat Baboos.
The people whisper as he passes, "There goes Ali Baba"; and echo
answers "Who is Ali Baba?" Then a little wind of conjecture breathes
through the pine-trees and names are heard.
It is better not to call Ali Baba names. Nothing is so misleading as a
vulgar nomenclature. I once knew a man who was called "Counsellor of
the Empress" when he ought to have had his photograph exposed in the
London shop-windows like King Cetewayo, K.C.M.G. I have heard an
eminent Frontier General called "Judas Iscariot," and I myself was
once pointed out as a "Famine Commissioner," and afterwards as an
expurgated edition of the Secretary to the Punjab Government. People
seemed to think that Ali Baba would smell sweeter under some other
name. This was a mistake.
Almost everything you are told in Simla is a mistake. You should never
believe anything you hear till it is contradicted by the _Pioneer_. I
suppose the Government of India is the greatest _gobemouche_ in the
world. I suppose there never was an administration of equal importance
which received so much information and which was so ill-informed. At a
bureaucratic Simla dinner-party the abysses of ignorance that yawn
below the company on every Indian topic are quite appalling!
I once heard Mr. Stokes say that he had never heard of my book on the
Permanent Settlement; and yet Mr. Stokes is a decidedly intelligent
man, with some knowledge of Cymric and law. I daresay now if you were
to draw off and decant the law on his brain, it would amount to a full
dose for an adult; yet he never heard of my book on the Permanent
Settlement. He knew about Blackstone; he had seen an old copy once in
a second-hand book shop; but he had never heard of my work! How
loosely the world floats around us! I question its objective reality.
I doubt whether anything has more objectivity in it than Ali Baba
himself. He was certainly flogged at school. Yet when we now try to
put our finger on Ali Baba he eludes the touch; when we try to lay him
he starts up gibbering at Cabul, Lahore, or elsewhere. Perhaps it is
easier to imprison him in morocco boards and allow him to be blown
with restless violence round about the pendant world, abandoned to
critics: whom our lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling.
[Ali Baba! I know not what thou art, but know that thou and I must
part; and why or where and how we met, I own to me's a secret yet. Ali
Baba, we've been long together through pleasant and through cloudy
weather; 'tis hard to part when things are dear, bar silver, piece
cloth, bottled beer, then steal away with this short warning: choose
thine own winding-sheet, say not good-night here, but in some brighter
binding, sweet, bid me good morning.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.
EXTRACTS FROM _SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS_.
BY "OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN."
_The Bombay Gazette Press_, 1881.
No. XXXIV
THE TEAPOT SERIES
SOCIAL DISSECTION
[January 5, 1880.]
GOSSIP I.
MY DEAR MRS. SMITH,
I cannot understand why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd figure--for really
I can apply no other adjective to it--should wear that most absurdly
tight dress. Some one should tell her what a fright it makes of her.
She is nothing but convexities. She looks exactly like an hour-glass,
or a sodawater machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell
whether she is coming to you, or going away from you. She looks just
the same all round. People call her smile sweet; but then it is the
mere sweetness of inanity. It is the blank brightness of an empty
chamber. She sheds these smiles upon everyone and everything, and they
are felt to be cold like moonshine. Speaking for myself, these
_eau-sucré_ smiles could not suckle my love. I would languish upon
them. My love demands stronger drink. Mrs. Smith's features are good,
no doubt. Her eyes are good. An oculist would be satisfied with them.
They have a cornea, a crystalline lens, a retina, and so on, and she
can see with them. This is all very satisfactory, I do not deny, as
far as it goes. Physiologically her eyes are admirable; but for
poetry, for love, or even for flirting, they are useless. There is no
significance in them, no witchery, no suggestiveness. The aurora of
beautiful far-away thoughts does not coruscate in them. Her eyelids
conceal them, but do not quench them. They would be nothing for
winking, or tears. If she winked at me, I should not jump into the
air, as if shot in the spine, with my blood tingling to my
extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum; my blushes
would not come perspiring through my whiskers. Her winking would
altogether misfire. Why? Because her winking would be physiological
and not erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would not be for
any lovelight in her eye; it would never be the quick, fierce, hot,
biting electric passion of the fleshly poets, it would be what a
chemist might call the "eremacausis" kindled by habit. Mrs. Smith's
tears are quite the poorest product of the lachrymal glands I have
ever seen. They are simply a form of water. They might dribble from an
effete pump; they might leak from a worn-out _mashq_.[AA] I observe
them with pity and regret. Their drip has no echo in my bosom; it
produces no stalactites of sympathy in my heart.
I have often been told that her nose was good--and good it
unquestionably is--good for blowing; good for sneezing; good for
snoring; good for smelling; a fine nose for a catarrh. But who could
play with it? Who could tweak it passionately, as a prelude to
kissing? Who could linger over it tenderly with a candle, or a lump of
mutton fat, when cold had laid its cruel hand upon it? It is not
tip-tilted like a flower; it is not whimsical with some ravishing and
unexpected little crook. It is straight, like a mathematical line. But
it has no parts. Her cheeks are round and fair. Each has its dimple
and blush. They are thoroughly healthy, Mrs. Smith's digestion is
unexceptionable. You might indicate the contour of these cheeks with a
pair of compasses; you might paint them with your thumb. Poor Mrs.
Smith's talk, or babble rather, is of her husband, her children, her
home. It is a mere purring over them. She never cuts them to pieces,
and holds them up to scorn and mockery. She never penetrates their
weaknesses. She does not even understand that Smith is a common-place,
stereotyped kind of fellow, exactly like hundreds of other men in his
class. She does not appear to notice the ghastly defects in his
education, tastes, and character, which gape before all the world
else. She does not see that he is without the _morbidezza_ of culture;
that he finds no _appogiatura_ in art; that he never rises at
midnight, amid lightning and rain, to emit an inarticulate cry of
æsthetic anguish in some metrical construction of the renaissance
period. She does not miss in him that yearning after the unattainable,
which in some mysterious wise fills us with a mute despair; which has
in it yet I know not what of sweetness amid the delirious aspirations
with which it distracts us. She cannot know, with her base instincts
dragging her down to the hearth-level of home and child, the material
gracelessness of her husband, equally incapable of striking an
Anglo-Saxon, or a mediæval attitude; and with his blood flushed,
healthy face unable to realize in his expression that divine sorrow
which can alone distinguish the man of culture from ordinary
Englishmen, or the anthropoid apes. She will never know what vibrates
so harshly on us--the want of feeling for colour which is displayed in
the coarse tone of his brown hair. So in regard to her children, the
mind of Mrs. Smith is quite uncritical. Look at that baby, like a
thousand other babies you see every day. It has not a single
idiosyncrasy on which anyone above the intellectual level of a
_crétin_ could hang an affection. Its porcine eyes twinkle dimly
through rolls of fat; it splutters and puffs, and its habits are
simply abominable. What a gross home for that life's star, which hath
had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar! The star is quenched
in fat; it has exchanged the music of the spheres for a hideous
caterwauling! Yet Mrs. Smith loves that child, and gobbles over it,
descending to its abysses of grossness.
Her house is one of many in a long unlovely street; it is furnished
according to the most corrupt dictates of bestial Philistinism--that
is, with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the
papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone
in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion,
concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye
and foolish heart, loves this wretched shelter, and would pour out her
idiotic tears if she were leaving it for Paradise.
But if we descend from our aesthetic heights to the lowly level of the
biped Smith, we may see Mrs. S. in a totally different atmosphere, and
certain lights and shadows will play about her with a radiance not
altogether without beauty. She is a single-minded woman, anxious to
make her husband and children comfortable and happy in their
home,--and dreaming of nothing beyond this. She is full of homely
wisdom; a hundred little economies she practises with forethought and
unwearying assiduity tend to make her husband and children love her
and regard her as a paragon of domestic policy. Her husband's
affection and her children's affection are all the world to her; music
and painting and poetry, Mr. Ruskin, Phidias, Praxiteles, Holman Hunt,
and Mr. Whistler pale away into shadows of shadows in presence of the
indications of love she receives from that baby. And this intense
single-minded love elevates her within its own compass. She sees in
that baby's eyes the light that never was on sea or land, the
consecration and the mother's dream. She broods over it till she
effects for it in her own maternal fancy an apotheosis; and round its
image in her heart there glows a bright halo of poetry. She sees
through the fat. The grossness disappears before her rapt gaze. There
remains the spirit from heaven:--
Sweet spirit newly come from Heaven
With all the God upon thee, still
Beams of no earthly light are given
Thy heart e'en yet to bless and fill.
Thy soul a sky whose sun has set,
Wears glory hovering round it yet;
And childhood's eve glows sadly bright
Ere life hath deepened into night.
So with the husband; so with the home; a glory gathers round them,
which she alone, the intense worshipper, sees; and this unæsthetic
Mrs. Smith, altogether unsatisfactory to the artistic eye, most
practical, most commonplace, carries within her some of the Promethean
flame, and is worthy of that halo of homely joy and affection with
which she is crowned.
No. XXXV
SAHIB
[February 19, 1880.]
I first met him driving home from cutcherry in his buggy. He was a fat
man in the early afternoon of life. In his blue eyes lay the mystery
of many a secret salad and unwritten milk-punch; but though he smoked
the longest cheroots of Trichinopoly and Dindigul, his hand was still
steady and still grasped a cue or a long tumbler, with the unerring
certainty of early youth and unshaken health.
Of an evening he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he
would "just drop in," as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand
fashion, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid
genial smiles and a brandishing of his long cheroot, playfully
indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which he had been long
acquainted.
As he began to glow with conversation and brandy, he would call for
cards and play écarté with me, until the room gradually resolved
itself into one of the circles of some Californian Inferno, with a
knave of spades digging the diamonds out of my heart and clubbing my
trumps.
He would leave me throbbing with the eructation of oaths and the
hollow aching of an empty purse, and uncertain whether to give up
cards and liquor for hymns and Government paper or whether to call him
back and take fortune by storm. But he had gone off with a resolute
"good night" that tended to dispel illusions; he had gone to his own
No. 1 Exshaw and his French novels, which he read as he lay on his
solitary bachelor couch.
Yes,--his bachelor couch, for he was not married. He had loved much
and often. He had loved a great many people in different stations of
life, but they did not marry him. He was, upon the whole, glad that
they did not marry him; for they were often married to other people,
and he would have been lonely with one, dissatisfied with two, and
embarrassed with more; so he continued his austere bachelor life; and
always tried to love unostentatiously somebody else's wife.
He loved somebody else's wife, because he had no wife of his own, and
the heart requires love. It was very wrong of him to love somebody
else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged to
another; but then he had nothing puritanical or pharisaical in his
nature; he was too highly cultivated to be moral, and arguing the
point in the mood of sweet _Barbara_, he had often succeeded in
persuading pretty women that he did right in loving them, though their
household duties belonged to another.
I have said that he was too highly cultivated to be religious. He was
exceedingly emotional and intellectual; and the procrustean bed of a
creed would have been intolerable torture to him. Life throbbed around
him in an aurora of skittles. The world of morality only raised a
languid smile, or tickled an appetite pleased with novelty. An
archdeacon, or a book of sermons delighted him. He would play with
them and ponder over them, as if they were old china, or curious
etchings. But he was never profane, especially before bishops, or
children, and he always went to church on Sunday morning.