old-fashioned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his
acquaintance in their devotional moods and attitudes. There was hardly
any mood or attitude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly
because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly for
other reasons. I suppose he was a student of human nature, though he
always repudiated the notion of being a student of anything. He said
that life was too short for serious study, and that every kind of
pursuit should be tempered with fooling; while to prevent fooling
becoming wearisome it should always be dashed with something earnest,
as the sodawater is dashed with brandy, or the Government of India
with Mr. Whitley Stokes.
Nigrorum memor, dum licet, ignium,
Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem:
Dulce est desipere in loco.
But besides being a man of pleasure and a capital billiard player, he
was a Collector in the North-Western Provinces--a man who sat at the
receipt of custom under a punkah, and read his _Pioneer_. The Lord
High Cockalorum at Nynee Tal, Sir Somebody Thingmajig,--I am speaking
of years ago--did not like him, I believe; but nobody thought any the
worse of him for this; and although he continued to be a Collector
until the shades of evening, when all his contemporaries had retired
into the Dreamland of Commissionerships, he still loved and was loved;
and to the very last he read his French novels and quoted Horace,
sitting peacefully on the bank while the stream of promotion rolled
on, knowing well that it would roll on _in omne ævum_, and not caring
a jot whether it did, or did not. What was a seat at the Sadr
Board[BB] to him, a seat among the solemn mummies of the service? He
would not object to lie in the same graveyard with them; but to sit at
the same board while this sensible warm motion of life still continued
was too much; this could never be. He belonged to a higher order of
spirits. As a boy he had not bartered the music of his soul for
Eastern languages and the Rent Law; and as an old man he would not sit
in state with corpses faintly animated by rupees.
To the last he mocked promotion; he mocked, till the dread mocker laid
mocking fingers on his liver, and till gibe and laughter were silenced
for evermore. So the Collector died, the merry Collector; and "where
shall we bury the merry Collector?" became the last problem for his
friends to deal with. I was in far away lands at the time with another
friend of his--we mourned for the Collector.
We would have buried him in soft summer weather under sweet arbute
trees, near the shore of some murmuring Italian sea. The west wind
should whisper its grief over his grave for ever:--
"Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers."
Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous
rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until
time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would
nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of
inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering
shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--
"Where through groves deep and high,
Sounds the far billow,
Where early violets die under the willow.
There, through the summer day,
Cool streams are laving;
There, while the tempests sway,
Scarce are boughs waving;
There thy rest should'st thou take,
Parted for ever,
Never again to wake: never, O never!"
With tender hand we would have traced on his memorial urn some
valediction--not without hope--of love and friendship.
It was otherwise. He was buried during a dust-storm in a loathsome
Indian cemetery. No friend stood by the grave. A hard priest
reluctantly pattered an abbreviated service: and people whispered that
it was not well with the Collector's soul. He is now forgotten.
But, dear friend, thy memory blossoms in my heart for ever, thy merry
laugh will still sound in my ear:--
"Abiding with me till I sail
To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
And this electric force, that keeps
A thousand pulses dancing, fail."
No. XXXVIII
THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS
[March 29, 1880.]
For some days the moustaches had been assuming a fiercer curl; more
and more troopers had been added to the escort; the Lord whispered in
the unreluctant ear softer and softer nothings; the scarlet runners
bowed lower and lower; and it was rumoured that the Lord had given the
Gryphon a pot of his own club-mutton hair-grease. It would be a halo.
This development of glory must have a limit: a feeling got abroad that
the Gryphon must go.
The Commander-in-Chief would come up to him bathed in smiles and say
nothing; at other times with tears in his eyes he would swear with far
resounding, multitudinous oaths to accompany the Gryphon. One day
Wolseley's pocket-book and a tooth-brush would be packed in tin; next
day they would be unpacked. The vacillation was awful; it amounted to
an agony; it involved all the circles; the newspapers were profoundly
moved.
The Gryphon starts. Editors forget their proofs; Baboos forget Moses;
mothers forget their cicisbeos. The mind of Calcutta is turned upon
the Gryphon.
A thousand blue eyes and ten thousand black focus him. He takes his
seat. A double-first class carriage has been reserved. The
Superintendent-General of Balloons and Fireworks appears on the
platform: the Gryphon steps out, takes precedence of him, and then
returns to his carriage. The excitement increases. Pre-paid telegrams
are flashed to Bombay, Madras, Allahabad, and Lahore; the engine
whistles "God save the Queen-Empress and the Secretary to the Punjab
Government;" and the train pours out its glories into the darkness.
My Lord is deeply stirred. He believes the Asian mystery has been
solved. He returns to Government House and gives vent to his
overwrought feelings in smoke--Parascho cigarettes; then he telegraphs
himself to sleep. Dreams sweep over him, issuing from the fabled gates
of shining ivory.
Meanwhile the Gryphon speeds on, yearning like a god in pain for his
far-away aphelion in Kabul. Morning bashfully overtakes him; and the
train dances into stations festooned with branches of olive and palm.
A _feu-de-joie_ of champagne corks is fired; special correspondents in
clean white trousers enliven the scene; Baron Reuter's ubiquitous
young man turns on rapturous telegrams; and a faint smile dawns darkly
on the Gryphon's scorn-worn face.
Merrily shrieks the whistling engine as the Punjab comes sliding down,
the round world to welcome its curled darling. It spurns with
contemptuous piston the vulgar corn-growing provinces of Couper; it
seeks the fields that are sown with dragon's teeth; it hisses forward
with furious joy, like the flaming chariot of some Heaven-booked
Prophet. Already Egerton anticipates its welcome advent. He can hardly
sit still on his pro-consular throne; he smiles in dockets and
demi-officials; he walks up and down his alabaster halls, and out into
his gardens of asphodel, and snuffs the air. It is redolent with some
rare effluvium; pomatum-laden winds breathe across the daffadown
dillies from the warm chambers of the south. A cloud crosses His
Honour's face, a summer cloud dissolving into sunshine. "It is the
pomade of Saul:--but it is our own glorious David whose unctuous curls
carry the Elysian fragrance." Then taking up his harp and dancing an
ecstatic measure, he sings--
"He is coming, my Gryphon, my swell;
Were it ever so laden with care,
My heart would know him, and smell
The grease in his coal-black hair."
The whole of the Punjab is astir. Deputy Commissioners, and Extra
Assistant Commissioners, and Kookas, and Sikhs, and Mazhabi-Sikhs
crowd the stations; but the Gryphon passes fiercely onwards. The light
of battle is now in his eye; he is in uniform; a political sword hangs
from his divine waist; a looking-glass poses itself before him. Life
burns wildly in his heart: time throbs along in hot seconds; Eternity
unfolds around her far-receding horizons of glory.
The train emits telegrams as it hurls itself forward: "the Gryphon is
well:--he is in the presence of his Future:--History watches him:--he
is drinking a peg:--the _Civil and Military Gazette_ has caught a
glimpse of him:--glory, glory, glory, to the Gryphon, the mock turtle
is his wash-pot, over Lyall will he cast his shoe."
Earthquakes are felt all along the line from Peshawar to Kabul.
Strings of camels laden with portmanteaus stretch from the rising to
the setting sun. The whole of the Guides and Bengal Cavalry have
resolved themselves into orderlies, and are riding behind the Gryphon.
Tens of thousands of insurgents are lining the road and making holiday
to see the Gryphon pass.
Kabul is astir. Roberts, with bare feet and a rope round his neck,
comes forward, performs _Kadambosi_ and presents the keys of Sherpur
to the Gryphon, who hands them graciously to his Extra Assistant
Deputy Khidmatgar General. The wires are red hot with messages: "The
Gryphon is taking a pill; the Gryphon is bathing; the Gryphon is
breakfasting; the Gryphon is making a joke; the Gryphon has been
bitten by a flea; the wound is not pronounced dangerous, he is
recovering slowly:--Glory, glory to the Gryphon--Amen, amen!"--
YOUR POLITICAL ORPHAN.
No. XXXIX
THE ORPHAN'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS
[June 8, 1880.]
Part I.--Persons I will try to avoid.
" II.--Things I will try to avoid.
" III.--Habits I will try to avoid.
" IV.--Opinions I will try to avoid.
" V.--Circumstances I will try to avoid.
* * * * *
PART I.--BAD COMPANY.
PERSONS I WILL TRY TO AVOID.
1.
He has a villa in the country; but his place of business is in town;
somewhere near Sackville Street. Vulgarity had marked him for her own
at an early age. She had set her mark indelibly on his speech, his
manners, and his habits. When ten years old he had learned to aspirate
his initial vowels; when twelve he had mastered the whole theory and
practice of eating cheese with his knife; at seventeen his mind was
saturated with ribald music of the Vaudeville type.
Reader, you anticipate me? You suppose I refer to one of Mr.
Gladstone's new Ministers, or to one of Lord Beaconsfield's new
Baronets?
You are, of course, mistaken. My man is a tailor; one of the best
tailors in the world. He has made hundreds of coats for me; and he has
sent me hundreds of circulars and bills.
Now, however, he has lost my address, and there seems a coolness
between us. We stand aloof; the scars remaining.
His name is Sartor, and I owe him a good deal of money.
2.
He is always up to the Hills when the weather is unpleasant on the
plains. Butterfly-collecting, singing to a guitar passionate songs of
love and hate, and lying the live-long day on a long chair with a long
tumbler in his hand, and a volume of Longfellow on the floor, are his
characteristic pursuits. It is needless to say that he is the
Accountant-General, and the last man in the world to suppose that I
have given myself ten days' privilege leave to the Hills on urgent
private affairs,--_affairs de coeur_, and _affairs de rien_, of sorts.
3.
His head is shaved to the bone; his face, of the Semitic type, is most
sinister, truculent, and ferocious; his filthy Afghan rags bristle
with knives and tulwars. He carries five or six matchlocks under one
arm, and a hymn book, or Koran, under the other. He is in holy
orders--a Ghazi! A pint, or a pint and a half, of my blood, would earn
for him Paradise, with sharab, houris, and all the rest of it.
4.
He was once an exceedingly pleasant fellow, full of talk and anecdote.
We were at school together. He was captain of our eleven and at the
head of the sixth form. I looked up to him; quoted him; imitated him;
lent him my pocket money. Afterwards a great many other people lent
him their money too, and played _écarté_ with him; yet at no period of
his life was he rich, and now he is decidedly poor. Still the old love
of borrowing money and playing _écarté_ burns hectically in his bosom,
and with years a habit of turning up the king has grown upon him. No
one likes to tell him that he has acquired this habit of turning up
the king; he is so poor!
5.
She was rather nice-looking once, and I amused myself with fancying
that I loved her. She was to me the summer pilot of an empty heart
unto the shores of nothing. It was then that I acquired that facility
in versification which has since so often helped to bind a book, or
line a box, or served to curl a maiden's locks. She, learned reams of
those verses by heart, and still repeats them. Her good looks and my
illusions have passed away: but those verses--those thrice accursed
verses, remain. How they make my ears tingle! How they burn my cheeks!
Will time, think you, never impair her infernal memory?
6.
I lisp a little, it is true; but, thank goodness, no longer in
numbers. I only lisp a little when any occasion arises to utter
sibilant sounds; on such occasions this little girl, the only child of
her mother, and she a widow, mimics my infirmity. The widow is silly
and laughs nervously, as people with a fine sense of humour laugh in
church when a book falls. This laugh of the widow is not easy to bear;
for she is pretty. Were she not pretty her mocking child would come, I
ween, to some untimely end.
7.
My Lord is, more or less, admired by two or three young ladies I know;
and when he puts his arm round my neck and drags me up and down a
crowded ball-room I cannot help wishing that they were in the pillory
instead of me. I really wish to be polite to H.E., but how can I say
that I think he was justified in finessing his deficit and playing
surpluses?
How can I agree with him when he says that Abdur Rahman will come
galloping in to Cabul to tender his submission as soon as he receives
Mr. Lepel Griffin's photograph neatly wrapped up in a Post Office
Order for two lakhs of rupees? And then that Star of India he is
always pressing on me! As I say to him,--what should I do with it?
I can't go hanging things round my neck like King Coffee Calcalli, or
the Emperor of Blue China.
But soon it will not be difficult for me to avoid my Lord: for
"Sic desideriis icta fidelibus
Quærit patria Cæsarem."
8.
He still smiles when we meet; and I don't think any the less of him
because he was called "Bumble" at school and afterwards made Governor
of Bombay. Men drift unconsciously into these things. But when I
happen to be near him he has a nervous way of lunging with his stick
that I can't quite get over. They say he once dreamt that I had poked
fun at him in a newspaper; and the hallucination continues to produce
an angry aberration of his mind, coupled with gnashing of the teeth
and other dangerous symptoms.
9.
He is a huge gob of flesh, which is perhaps animated dimly by some
spark of humanity smouldering filthily in a heart cancerous with
money-grubbing. His whole character and mode of life stink with
poisonous exhalations in my moral nostrils. Nature denounces, in her
loud commination service, his clammy hand, his restless eye, his
sinister and bestial mouth. Why should he waken me from the dreams of
literature and the low music of my own reflections to disgorge from
the cesspool of his mind the impertinent questions and the loathsome
compliments which form his notion of conversation? He has come to "pay
his respects." I abhor "his respects." He is rich:--What is that to
me? He is powerful with all the power of corruption: I scorn his
power, I figuratively spit upon it. He is perhaps the man whom the
Government delights to honour. More shame to the Government! A bully
at home, and a tyrant among his own people, on all sides dastardly and
mean, he is a bad representative of a gentle and intellectual race,
that for its heroic traditions, its high thoughts, its noble language
and its exquisite urbanity has been the wonder of the whole world
since the dawn of history.
10.
A cocked hat, a tailcoat with gold buttons and a rapier:--"See'st thou
not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not his gait in it
the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court-odour from him?
Reflects he not on thy baseness court-contempt?" Observe how
mysterious he is: consider the secrets burning on his tongue. He is
all asides and whispers and winks and nods to other young popinjays of
the same feather. He could tell you the very brand of the pills the
Raja is taking: he receives the paltriest gossip of the Nawab's court
filtered through a lying vakeel. Ten to one he carries in his pocket a
cipher telegram from Simla empowering him to confer the title of
_Jee_[CC] on some neighbouring Thakor. Surely it is no wonder that he
believes himself to be the hub of creation. Within a radius of twenty
miles there is no one even fit to come between the wind and his
nobility. If he should ever catch hold of you by the arm and take you
aside for a moment from the madding crowd of a lawn-tennis party to
whisper in your ear the arrival of a complimentary _Kharita_ and a
pound of sweetmeats from the Foreign Office for the Jam of Bredanbatta
you should let off smiles and blushes in token of the honour and glory
thus placed at your credit.
11.
All Assistant-Magistrates on their first arrival in this country,
stuffed like Christmas turkeys with abstracts and notes, the pemmican
of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but
the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts
with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature
_ennui_ is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never
known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of
undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities
and little attentions in the shape of guineas and stalls at the opera,
such as good-natured seniors delight to show to promising young
kinsmen and friends. Yet his talk is of the studio, the editor's room,
and the club; it is flavoured with the _argot_ of the great world, the
half world and Bohemia; he flings great names in your face, dropping
with a sublime familiarity the vulgar prefixes of "Mr." and "Lord,"
and he overwhelms you with his knowledge of women and their wicked
ways. Clever Ouida, with her tawdry splendours, her guardsmen, her
peers, her painters and her Aspasias, and the "society papers," with
their confidences and their personalities, have much to answer for in
the case of this would-be man of the world.
No. XL
SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA
[October 21, 1880.]
There were thirteen of them, and they sat down to dinner just as the
clock in the steeple chimed midnight. The sheeted dead squeaked and
gibbered in their graves; the owl hooted in the ivy. "For what we are
going to receive may the Secret Powers of Nature and the force of
circumstances make us truly thankful," devoutly exclaimed the domestic
medium. The spirits of Chaos and Cosmos rapped a courteous
acknowledgment on the table. _Potage à la sorcière_ (after the famous
recipe in Macbeth) was served in a cauldron; and while it was being
handed round, Hume recited his celebrated argument regarding miracles.
He had hardly reached the twenty-fifth hypothesis, when a sharp cry
startled the company, and Mr. Cyper Redalf, the eminent journalist,
was observed to lean back in his chair, pale and speechless. His whole
frame was convulsed with emotion; his hair stood erect and emitted
electro-biological sparks. The company sat aghast. A basin of soup
dashed in his face and a few mesmeric passes soon brought him round,
however; and presently he was able to explain to the assembled
carousers the cause of his agitation. It was a recollection, a tender
memory of youth. The umbrella of his boyhood had suddenly surged upon
his imagination! It was an umbrella from which he had been parted for
years: it was an umbrella round which had once centred associations
solemn and mysterious. In itself there had been nothing remarkable
about the umbrella. It was a gingham, conceived in the liberal spirit
of a bygone age; such an umbrella as you would not easily forget when
it had once fairly bloomed on the retina of your eye; yet an everyday
umbrella, a commonplace umbrella half a century ago; an umbrella that
would have elicited no remark from our great-grandmothers, hardly a
smile from our grandmothers; but an umbrella well calculated to excite
the affections and stimulate the imagination of an impulsive,
high-spirited, and impressionable boy. It was an umbrella not easily
forgotten; an umbrella that necessarily produced a large and deep
impression on the mind.
All present were profoundly moved; a feeling of dismay crept over
them, defacing their festivity. Tears were shed. Only from one pair of
damp eyes did any gleam of hope or comfort radiate.
A distinguished foreigner, well known in the uttermost spirit-circles,
wiped from his brow drops of perspiration which some dream had
loosened from his brain. He felt the tide of psychic force beating
upon the high shores of his heart. He was conscious of a
constitutional change sweeping like a tempest over his protoplastic
tissue. He felt that the secret fountains of his being were troubled
by the angel of spirit-rapping, and that his gross, unbelieving
nature stepped down, bathed, and was healed. The Moses of the
spirit-wilderness struck the rock of his material life, and occult
dynamics came welling forth from the undiscovered springs of
consciousness. His mortal statics lost their equilibrium in a general
flux of soul. A cyclone raged round his mesmeric aura. He began to
apprehend an epiphany of electro-biological potentiality. The fierce
light that never was in kerosine or tallow dawned round him; matter
melted like mist; souls were carousing about him; the great soul of
nature brooded like an aurora of clairvoyance above all; his awful
mediumhood held him fiercely in her mystic domination; and things grew
to a point. From the focus of the clairvoyant aurora clouds of
creative impulse gathered, and sweeping soulward were condensed in
immaterial atoms upon the cold peaks of Purpose. Thus a spiritual
gingham impressed upon his soul of souls a matrix, out of which, by a
fine progenitive effort, he now begets and ejects a materialized
gingham into a potato-plot of the garden without.
The thing is patent to all who live above the dead-level of vulgar
imbecility. No head of a department could fail to understand it.
Indeed, to such as live on the uplands of speculation, not only is the
process lucid in itself, but it is luciferous, illuminating all the
obscure hiding-places of Nature. It is the magic-lantern of creation;
it is the key to all mysticism, to the three-card trick, and to the
basket-trick; it sheds a glory upon thimble-rigging, a halo upon
legerdemain; it even radiates vagabond beams of splendour upon
pocket-picking and the cognate arts. It explains how the apples get
into the dumpling; how the milk comes out of the cocoanut; how the
deficit issues from the surplus; how matter evolves itself from
nothing. It renders the hypothesis of a First Cause not only
unnecessary, but exquisitely ludicrous. Under such dry light as it
offers to our intelligence the whole epos of Christianity seems a
vapid dream.