DHARWAR
Dharwar Station is not so unlike one we know within two and a half miles
of the centre of Scotland. It is almost the same size but there is no
village. Though not imposing, I understand it is the nerve centre of
some 1,500 miles of The Southern Maharatta Railway.
As we pull up my brother, Colonel and Agent on the platform, remarks,
"Well, here you are, you're looking well--have you any luggage?" and in
a twinkling we are driving away, leaving the "little pick" of luggage to
the boy to bring up leisurely. G.'s maid drives off in a princely padded
ox cart or dumbie, and we get into a new modern victoria. I am not sure
which is the most distinguished, perhaps the dumbie; it is at any rate
more Oriental, and its bright red and blue linings, white hood, and two
thoroughbred white oxen make a very gay turn-out.
The Agent's bungalow is wide-spreading, flat-roofed, with deep verandah
supported on white-washed classic pillars, and surrounded by a park.
There are borders of blooming chrysanthemums and China asters, and trees
with quaint foliage, and flowering creepers about the house. The flower
borders seem to tail away into dry grass and bushes and trees of the
park, and that changes imperceptibly into dry rolling country with
scattered trees and bushes.
Lunch is served by waiters in white clothes and bare feet, "velvet
footed waiters" to be conventional, and there is a blessed peace and
quietness about our new surroundings. For weeks past we have ever heard
our fellows' voices all the day long; what a contrast is this quiet and
elbow room to the crowd on the P. & O. and the gun firing and babel of
Bombay.
... It is overcast and still; away to the east over the rolling bushy
country are heavy showers, but at this spot trees and crops faint for
water. We doze in the verandah and wake and doze again, and wonder how
this silence--can be real, even the birds seem subdued. We notice
E.H.A.'s friends are here in numbers, Mina birds, the Seven Sisters,
King Crows, and one of his (E.H.A.'s) enemies comes in as I write, a
yellow-eyed frog; he hops in on the matting and looks and looks--I like
the unfathomable philosophy in its golden eye. And my brother stops
reading Indian politics and calls me outside to see a Horn Bill--all
beak, and little head or body to speak of, he sways on a leafless tree
and scraiks anxiously for his friends; they are generally in companies
of three or four. A little later, as I write beside a reading lamp in
G.'s room, a lizard takes a position on the window, and out of the outer
darkness comes a moth and lights on to the outside of the pane, and the
lizard pecks at it--neither the moth nor the lizard understand
glass--peck, peck, every now and then--trying to get through to the
moth--how delightfully human--the perpetual endeavour to get Beyond,
without the will or power to see the infinite reflections of the Inside.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As we speculate to-night as to where some of our neighbours on the
"Egypt" may have got to by this time, the post comes in with letters
from this one and the other. One is from Mrs Deputy-Commissioner. A few
days ago we were altogether in Bombay, melting in the heat, and now we
are towards the south of this Peninsula, and she writes from its
farthest north: we are in a hot parched country, whilst she and the
D.-C. are in camp, sitting over a huge fire of logs in a pine forest.
She writes, "To-morrow we enter a valley where five bears have recently
been seen and pheasants abound," and the day after "we shall be at the
top of the pass, 9,000 feet. Rosy snows and golden mists far below us
melt into purple depths."... So this day's journal closes with pleasant
thoughts of relatives and pleasant friends in many distant parts of this
wide land.
... Sunday.--We arrived here on Friday--the silence is almost
oppressive. Great grey clouds roll up from the east all day till
evening, when they form solid bluish ranks; each cloud threatens rain
which never falls. The stillness in the bungalow is only broken by the
occasional cheep, cheep, cheep of the house lizard, a tiny little fellow
that lives behind picture frames and in unused jugs and corners. His
body is only about an inch and a half long, but his clear voice fills
the large rooms and emphasies the silence. Outside it is as quiet; there
is the chink--chink of the copper-smith bird, like a drop of water at
regular intervals into a metal bowl.
The Colonel and G. rode at 8 A.M., and I biked. It is not such
interesting country here as what we came through in the train--rolling,
stoney, with friable red soil, and hard to ride on. Many dusty roads
meet at all angles; along these you meet herds of buffalo and cows
driven leisurely by boys or men. Some cows, of errant natures, have logs
dangling by a rope from their necks amongst their feet; they can't go
off very fast or far with the encumbrance. They stir up the dust as they
go along, and it falls and lies on the children till their dark skins
have a bloom like sloe-berries. There are all sorts of birds to look
at--kites, crows, vultures, hawks, eagles; with these you can't expect
to see game birds, though it looks an ideal country, though perhaps a
little waterless, for pheasants and partridges. When I stop I see the
side of the road swarms with insect life, ants of various, kinds, black
and red, small and big, pegging along the level, and up and down trees,
as if the world depended on each individual's particular bustling. There
are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate--very hard and
strong. I don't know what they are built for--I must consider the matter
like the sluggard some day, if I have time, or read about them if that
is not a bigger order. What strikes you at first about the white ant is
that you never see it unless you lay its works open. His hard-sun-baked
protections run up the tree stems or wherever he goes and conceals and
protects his soft, white, fleshy body, and if you prise this casing open
you may see him getting away as fast as his little legs will take him;
really he is a termite you know, like a "wood louse or worm," and not an
ant. A wonder of the world is how he gets the liquid secretion to fasten
the grains of sand together to make his earthen tunnels. If he goes to
the top of a house to remove furniture or the like, he builds his tunnel
all the way up; and in a thirsty land the top storey of a sun-bitten
house does not seem the place to get water: but I must leave this
subject to the disquisitions of men of more leisure and greater
abilities, and proceed to make some observations on, and jottings of,
the figures on the road. Here are women bringing up great round
earthenware vases on their heads and little round brass bowls in their
hands, going and coming from a muddy pool in the centre of a waste of
dried mud. They go slowly, the walking is rough for bare feet, for the
clay is hard and baked and pitted with cows' feet marks. They drink and
wash their bowls in the dregs in the pond, the water already so dirty
that a self-respecting duck would not swim in it, and wade about
stirring up the mud, then fill their bowls and march away with it for
domestic uses--this sounds bad, but it looks a great deal worse. The
figures though are charming, with balanced bowl on head, and draperies
blown into such folds as a Greek would have loved to model.... But their
faces!--Phew! when you see them closely, are frightful!
It is difficult to catch their movement; they are so restless. All
people who wear loose draperies seem to be so; witness Spanish women,
and the Spanish type of women in our Highlands and Ireland, how they
keep constantly shifting their shawls.
[Illustration]
... The Club in evening--a tiny club, quite nice after a quiet day in
the bungalow. I was introduced to the five men there, who put me through
my paces very gently; I just passed I think, and no more. "Play
bridge?--No. Billiards?--Not much." I began to feel anxious and feared
they'd try cricket. "Tennis?--Yes, dote on tennis!" That smoothed
things, and then we got on to shooting, and all went off at a canter.
One of my inquisitors, Mr Huddleston, had been in Lumsden's Horse (the
Indian contingent in S. Africa), and said he had helped a young brother
of mine out of action at Thaban' Chu.[11] Lumsden's Horse got left there
and lost heavily. I knew this brother had been ridden off the stricken
field on Captain P. Chamney's back under heavy fire, one of these V.C.
doings that were discounted in S. Africa, and knew that two other
fellows rode on either side to steady the sanguinary burden. So here was
one of the two, and I asked who the other was, and he said, "Trooper
Ducat, but Powell mended your brother's head; didn't you meet him in the
Taj Hotel in Bombay?" And I laughed, for I remembered the doctor of the
Taj, a rather retiring man, who generally sat alone at a table in the
middle of the great dining-room; and that whenever he had friends dining
with him, and I looked up, I was safe to find either he or his friends
looking across in my direction, why I couldn't make out. Now it was
explained! He remembered mending a man's forehead that had been broken
by a piece of shell, and concluded from the surname in the Hotel Book,
and possibly family likeness, that I was the man, and naturally he would
say to his friends, "Look you at that man over there--wouldn't think he
had lost half his head with a pom-pom shell would you? but he did, and I
mended it!--It's pretty well done, isn't it? You can hardly see a mark."
[11] At Battle of Houtneck.
... Then evening service in a tiny church, a quiet, monotonous, gently
murmured lesson, and a few verses from the Old Testament about
sanguinary battles long ago and exemplary Hebrew warriors--how soothing!
Doors and windows are wide open, and moths fly in and round the lamps
from the blue night outside. The air is full of the rattle of the
cicada, which is like the sound of a loud cricket, or the 'r--r' of a
corncraik's note going on for ever and ever; and the house lizard in the
church goes cheep--cheep--cheep every now and then. No one pays any
attention to its loud sweet note. Rather pretty Eurasian girls play the
organ and sing, and look through their fingers as they pray.
Then we are dismissed, and find ourselves out in the dark, and the
longed for rain falling very lightly. The white dressed native servants
are there with lamps and bring up the bullock carts, and ladies go off
in them with the harness bells aringing. We have "The Victoria" of the
station--and faith, barring the exercise, I'd as soon not walk! Did not
Mr H. kill a great Russell viper at the club steps last night, and was
not bitten, and so is alive to tell the tale to-day and to-morrow, and
to show the skin, three feet long with a chain pattern down the back;
the beast!--it won't get out of your path; lies to be trodden on, then
turns and bites you, and you're dead in three minutes by the clock.
... To-day, Tuesday--could read a little--temperature down. Found it an
entertainment listening to the voices of various callers in the centre
hall of the bungalow, of which one half forms the drawing-room, the
other half the dining-room. The bedroom doors open into this, and these
doors are a foot off the ground, and fail to meet the top of the arches
above them by about other two feet. The advantage of this I fail to see,
further than that a convalescent or any other person who can't be
bothered talking, can if he pleases, listen to others conversing; if,
however, he prefers to sleep, he can't!
I got a glimpse of the gaily dressed callers through the transparent
purdahs that separate my room on the outside from the verandah. They
drove in white dumbies with white bullocks; the carts and harness
glistened with vermilion, sky blue, and gold details; the driver, black
of course, in livery, with a boy carrying a white yak's tail in
black-buck's horn to brush away flies. I was sorry to miss seeing these
kind people, but hope to get over the effect of sun, plus cold baths,
and return their calls, and so increase my stock of first impressions of
Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich
Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing
Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he
adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the
travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw
away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes
of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and
subjective." Crushing to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his
victim, the M.P., "is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this
ludicrous old Shrovetide cock, whose ignorance and information leave two
broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading
public." This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit
at Burns, the "incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for
verse"--a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr
Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to say in the "Contemporary
Review."
"I became acquainted in a few weeks with what the majority of our
civilian officers spend their lives in only half suspecting. My
experience has been that of a tourist, but I have returned satisfied
that it is quite possible to see, hear, and understand all that vitally
concerns our rule in India in six months' time."
After all, who may write about India? Major Jones said to me the other
day, "Why on earth is Smith writing about India--what does he know? he
is just out; why! I've been here over ten years and have just learned I
know nothing."
Then I said, "What about General Sir A. B. Blank's writings?" Blank is
going home after about forty years in India. "Oh! good gracious," he
said, "Blank's ideas are hopeless--utterly antiquated!" Therefore no one
may write about India; Smith is too inexperienced, Jones has only
learned he knows nothing, and General Blank is too antiquated.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This day we spent calling round the station. The owners of the two
first bungalows were out; at the third the hostess carried wreaths of
flowers, which she was on her way to place on her native butler's grave;
he had died of plague. The next house was full of madonnas and maids
worshipping the latest arrival in the station, a chubby boy of six
months. The father had retired to a quiet corner, but seeing another
mere man, he came out with certain alacrity and suggested a peg and
cheroot. The next house was the doctor's, and the Mrs Doctor and I were
just getting warm over Ireland, and had got to Athlone, Galway, and
Connemara, when the ten minutes, that seem law here, were up, and G.
rose to go, and I'd to leave recollections of potheen, and wet, and peat
reek, and "green beyond green"--such refreshing things even to think of
in this Eastern land, especially for us who are on the wander and know
we will be home soon. But it must be a different feeling for those
people at their posts, tied down by duty, year after year, with the
considerable chance of staying in the little bit of a cemetery with
others who failed to get home. But we must not touch on this aspect of
our peoples life out here, it is too deeply pathetic. At the next house
I did actually get a peg, and it was a pleasing change after buffalo
milk and quinine for days: and mine host, who had been on the "West
Coast," told me his experience of pegs in Africa. "The men," he said,
"who didn't take pegs there at all, all died for certain, and men who
took nips and pegs in excess died too; a few, however, who took them in
moderation survived."
Then we drove towards the sunset and rolling hills, and were overwhelmed
with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange
light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made
the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the
deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could
remember it exactly. One figure I can still see--there is an open space,
green grass, and Corot like trees on either side reflected in water,
and a girl carrying a black water-pot on her head, crosses the grass in
the rays of the setting sun--a splash of transparent rosy draperies
round a slight brown figure.
Friday.--Rode in morning with the Brother, painted and drove with G. in
the afternoon, tennis and badminton at club, and people to dinner; that
is not such a bad programme, is it? Not exciting, but healthy, bar the
excessive number of meals between events,[12] and tiresome in regard to
the inevitable number of changes of clothes. The ride we start after an
early cup of tea. It begins pleasantly cool, but in an hour you feel the
sun hot, and are glad to get in and change to dry clothes, and have
breakfast proper about 9 A.M. The Brother then goes to office, which is
a building like an extensive hydropathic, on an eminence to which on
various roads, at certain hours of the day, streams of tidy native
clerks may be seen going and coming. Of what they do when they get
there, or where they go when they leave I have no idea; the country all
round seems just red, rolling, gritty soil, with thorny bushes and
scattered trees! But there is a native town; possibly these men go
there, though their costumes are too trim to suggest native quarters.
There is such silence up here on the tableland at mid-day--only a light
soughing of the soft, hot wind, otherwise not even the cheep of a
lizard. A little later in the afternoon begins the note of a bird, like
a regular drop of water into a metal pot, very soft and liquid, and when
the gardener waters the flowers, more birds come round to drink. The
house too is absolutely still; the servants drowse in their quarters in
the compound; G. and her maid in a back room are quiet as mice; they got
a sewing machine, which was a very clever thing to do, but it was a
tartar, it wouldn't work--that was "Indian" I expect--so they have had a
most happy morning pulling it to bits, and putting it together again--I
wonder if they will make it go.
[12] Specially laid on for our benefit.
The most social part of the day here is the meeting at the club after
the business day is done. I have not heard Indian club life described,
but this club, though small, is, I think, fairly typical. Half the
station turns up at it every evening before dinner; I should think there
are generally about twenty ladies and men. You bike down, or drive, and
play tennis on hard clay courts, a very fast game; then play badminton
inside when it gets dark, and the lamps are lit.--I'd never played it
before. What a good game it is; but how difficult it is to see the
shuttle-cock in the half light as it crosses the lamp's rays--A.1.
practice for grouse driving, and a good middle-aged man's game; for
reach and quick eye and hand come in, and the player doesn't require to
be so nimble on his pins as at tennis. To-night the little station band
of little native men played outside the club under the trees, with two
or three hurricane lamps lighting their music and serious dark faces,
and the flying foxes hawked above them. Inside there was the feeling of
a jolly family circle--rather a big family of "grown-ups"--or a country
house party.
Dancing was beginning as we came away; men had changed from flannels to
evening dress, and ladies had dumbied home and back, and a bridge
tournament was being arranged. Think of the variety of costume this
means, and grouping and lights. The brother and G. had come in from
riding, G. in grey riding-skirt and white jacket, and the brother in
riding-breeches and leggings, and two men and a lady came in with clubs
from golf. Other men were in flannels, and some had already got into
evening kit, and it was the same with ladies--what a queer mixture.
Everyone seems perfectly independent of everyone else, except one or two
matrons who have the interests of the youths at heart, and bustle their
"dear boys" out of draughts, where "they will sit, after getting hot at
Badminton, and won't get ready for dancing or bridge." One cannot but
admire the brotherly and sisterly relationship that seems to exist
between these kindly exiles, the way they make the best of things and
stand by each other, such a little group of white people, possibly
thirty all told, in the midst of a countless world of blacks.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let us now discourse on duck-shooting for a change, and because it is a
safe subject, and like fishing, "has no sting in the tail of it." One of
the "dear boys" at the club asked if I'd care to go duck-shooting on
Sunday. This "youth" is country-bred, and for length and breadth and
colour and accent, you'd think he had just come out from the Isle of
Skye, the land of his people, where you know they run pretty big and
fit.
It was very kind of these fellows I think, asking me to join them. A
doubtful bag doesn't matter--it's a new country and I feel as keen as a
cockney on his first 12th--so I unpack my American automatic five
shooter, beside which all last year's single-trigger double-barrel
hammer-less ejectors are as flintlocks! "Murderous weapon, and
bloodthirsty shooter"--some old-fashioned gunners of to-day will say,
just as our grandfathers spoke when breechloaders came in, and that
delightful pastime with ramrod and wads, powder flask and shot belt went
out. So it ever has been! Since the day some horrid fellow used a bronze
sword instead of a stone on a stick, and since Richard of the Lion Heart
took to that "infernal instrument," the cross bow, because of its
"dreadful power," and so earned from Providence and Pope Innocent II.
"heavenly retribution," and was shot by one of its bolts.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As I write these somewhat discursive notes, there is a very old-world
figure passing our verandah every now and then; he is our night
watchman, called a Chowkidar or Ramoosee. He is heavily draped with dark
cloak of many vague folds, and carries a staff and lantern; he belongs
to a caste of robbers, and did he not receive his pittance, he and his
friends would loot the place--and possibly get shot trying to do so. He
flashes his lantern through your blinds as you try to sleep. Then if he
wakens you by his snoring, you steal out and pour water gently down his
neck.
A hyaena or jackal has started laughing outside--phew!--what an eerie
laugh--mad as can be--what horrid humour! I have mentioned a lady's
husband was taken away from her and eaten by a tiger lately, somewhere
about this country, so we begin to feel quite _in medias res_, though
far from the madding town.
To-morrow we drive to our shoot--start at six! To drive in dumbies,
about eight miles. But what does distance matter; it's our first day's
shooting in India--duck to-day, black-buck to-morrow, then sambhur,
perhaps, and who knows, the royal procession may not account for all the
tigers! and I begin to have a feeling that if one came within a fair
distance, and did not look very fierce, I'd be inclined to lowse off my
great heavy double-barrelled 450 cordite express and see if anything
happened.
[Illustration: The above painted by Allan Betty Iris and Uncle Gordon.]