_Of the Uncivilised Night and the Departure to Things Civilised.
Showing how a Friend may keep an Appointment too well._
“Let us go hence, my songs, she will not hear. Let us go hence together
without fear!” But Ram Baksh the irrepressible sang it in altogether a
baser key. He came by night to the pavilion on the lake, while the
sepoys were cooking their fish, and reiterated his whine about the
devildom of the country into which the Englishman had dragged him.
_Padre Martum Sahib_ would never have thus treated the owner of sixteen
horses, all fast and big ones, and eight superior “shutin tongas.” “Let
us get away,” said Ram Baksh. “You are not here for _shikar_, and the
water is very bad.” It was indeed, except when taken from the lake, and
then it only tasted fishy. “We will go, Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman.
“We will go in the very early morning, and in the meantime here is fish
to stay your stomach with.”
When a transparent _kanat_, which fails by three feet to reach ceiling
or floor, is the only bar between the East and the West, he would be a
churl indeed who stood upon “invidious race distinctions.” The
Englishman went out and fraternised with the Military--the four-rupee
soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They were armed, one with an old
Tower musket crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a native-made
smooth-bore, and one with a composite contrivance--English sporting
muzzle-loader stock with a compartment for a jointed cleaning-rod, and
hammered octagonal native barrel, wire-fastened, with a tuft of cotton
on the foresight. All three guns were loaded, and the owners were very
proud of them. They were simple folk, these men at arms, with an
inordinate appetite for broiled fish. They were not _always_ soldiers
they explained. They cultivated their crops until wanted for any duty
that might turn up. They were paid, now and again, at intervals, but
they were paid in coin and not in kind.
The _munshis_ and the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing
that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little
gathering on the bund was unrestrained. The _chowkidar_ came out of his
cave into the firelight. Warm wood ashes, by the way, like Epp’s cocoa,
are “grateful and comforting” to cold toes. He took a fish and
incontinently choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right again, he
launched into a very long and quite unintelligible story while the
sepoys said reverently:--“He is an old man and remembers many things.”
As he babbled, the night shut in upon the lake and the valley of Boondi.
The last cows were driven into the water for their evening drink, the
waterfowl and the monkeys went to bed, and the stars came out and made a
new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the lake. The light of the fire
showed the ruled line of the bund springing out of the soft darkness of
the wooded hill on the left and disappearing into the solid darkness of
the bare hill on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep
wandering pigs from the gardens whose tree-tops rose to a level with the
bund-edge. Beyond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle
buzz of the unseen city died out, it seemed as though the bund were the
very Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one knows, between this world
and the next. The water lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish
jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, blurring the peace of the
reflected heavens.
“And duller should I be than some fat weed
That rots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf.”
The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe’s wharf.
The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in
that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the
Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease
on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding
fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in
the hills; thus after as long a life as the _chowkidar’s_, dying easily
and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the
lake. Surely no one would come to reclaim him, across those weary, weary
miles of rock-strewn road.... “And this,” said the _chowkidar_, raising
his voice to enforce attention, “is true talk. Everybody knows it, and
now the Sahib knows it. I am an old man.” He fell asleep at once, with
his hand on the _chillam_ that was doing duty for a whole _hukka_ among
the company. He had been talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.
See how great a man is the true novelist! Six or seven thousand miles
away, Walter Besant of the Golden Pen had created Mr. Maliphant--the
ancient of figureheads, in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and here,
in Boondi, the Englishman had found Mr. Maliphant in the withered flesh.
So he drank Walter Besant’s health in the water of the Burra Talao. One
of the sepoys turned himself round, with a clatter of accoutrements,
shifted his blanket under his elbow, and told a tale. It had something
to do with his _khet_, and a _gunna_ which certainly was not sugar-cane.
It was elusive. At times it seemed that it was a woman, then changed to
a right of way, and lastly appeared to be a tax; but the more he
attempted to get at its meaning through the curious patois in which its
doings or its merits were enveloped, the more dazed the Englishman
became. None the less the story was a fine one, embellished with much
dramatic gesture which told powerfully against the firelight. Then the
second sepoy, who had been enjoying the _chillam_ all the time, told a
tale, the purport of which was that the dead in the tombs round the lake
were wont to get up of nights and _shikar_. This was a fine and ghostly
story; and its dismal effect was much heightened by some clamour of the
night far up the lake beyond the floor of stars.
The third sepoy said nothing. He had eaten too much fish and was fast
asleep by the side of the _chowkidar_.
[Illustration: Page 234--“This was a fine and ghostly story.”]
They were all Mahomedans, and consequently all easy to deal with. A
Hindu is an excellent person, but ... but ... there is no knowing what
is in his heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange
observances.
The Hindu or Mahomedan bent, which each Englishman’s mind must take
before he has been three years in the country is, of course, influenced
by Province or Presidency. In Rajputana generally, the Political swears
by the Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is untrustworthy. But a man
who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it
has been doctored with _shrab_, cannot be very bad after all.
That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were
snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the
enclosure of _kanats_ and woke the Englishman by muttering _Sahib_,
_Sahib_ in his ear. It was no robber but some poor devil with a
petition--a grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely unintelligible, and
additionally so in that he stammered almost to dumbness. He stood by the
bed, alternately bowing to the earth and standing erect, his arms spread
aloft, and his whole body working as he tried to force out some
rebellious word in a key that should not wake the men without. What
could the Englishman do? He was no Government servant, and had no
concern with _urzis_. It was laughable to lie in a warm bed and watch
this unfortunate heathen, clicking and choking and gasping in his
desperate desire to make the _Sahib_ understand. It was also
unpleasantly pathetic, and the listener found himself as blindly
striving to catch the meaning as the pleader to make himself
comprehended. But it was no use; and in the end the man departed as he
had come--bowed, abject, and unintelligible.
Let every word written against Ganesh be rescinded. It was by his
ordering that the Englishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as he
had never before set eyes on. Every fair morning is a reprint, blurred
perhaps, of the opening of the First Day; but this splendour was a thing
to be put aside from all other days and remembered. The stars had no
fire in them and the fish had stopped jumping, when the black water of
the lake paled and grew grey. While he watched, it seemed to the
Englishman that some voice on the hills were intoning the first verses
of Genesis. The grey light moved on the face of the waters till, with no
interval, a blood-red glare shot up from the horizon and, inky black
against the intense red, a giant crane floated out towards the sun. In
the still shadowed city the great Palace drum boomed and throbbed to
show that the gates were open, while the dawn swept up the valley and
made all things clear. The blind man who said:--“The blast of a trumpet
is red” spoke only the truth. The breaking of the red dawn is like the
blast of a trumpet.
“What,” said the _chowkidar_, picking the ashes of the overnight fire
out of his beard, “what, I say, are five eggs or twelve eggs to such a
Raj as ours? What also are fowls--what are"--.... “There was no talk of
fowls. Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the eggs?” “He is here.
No, he is there. I do not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj
supply everything without price. The _murghiwalla_ will be paid by the
State--liberally paid. Let the _Sahib_ be happy! _Wah_! _Wah_!”
Experience of _beegar_ in Himalayan villages had made the Englishman
very tender in raising supplies that were given _gratis_; but the
_murghiwalla_ could not be found, and the value of his wares was, later,
paid to Ganesh--Ganesh of Situr, for that is the name of the village
full of priests, through which the Englishman had passed in ignorance
two days before. A double handful of sweet smelling flowers made the
receipt.
Boondi was wide awake before half-past seven in the morning. Her
hunters, on foot and on horse, were filing towards the Deoli Gate to go
_shikarring_. They would hunt tiger and deer they said, even with
matchlocks and muzzle-loaders as uncouth as those the _Sahib_ saw. They
were a merry company and chaffed the Quarter-Guard at the gate
unmercifully when a bullock-cart, laden with the cases of the “Batoum
Naphtha and Oil Company” blocked the road. One of them had been a
soldier of the Queen, and, excited by the appearance of a _Sahib_, did
so rebuke and badger the Quarter-Guard for their slovenliness that they
threatened to come out of the barracks and destroy him.
So, after one last look at the Palace high up the hill side, the
Englishman was borne away along the Deoli road. The peculiarity of
Boondi is the peculiarity of the covered pitfall. One does not see it
till one falls into it. A quarter of a mile from the gate, it and its
Palace were invisible. The runners who had chivalrously volunteered to
protect the wanderer against possible dacoits had been satisfactorily
disposed of, and all was peace and unruffled loaferdom. But the
Englishman was grieved at heart. He had fallen in love with Boondi the
beautiful, and believed that he would never again see anything half so
fair. The utter untouchedness of the town was one-half the charm and its
associations the other. Read Tod, who is far too good to be chipped or
sampled, read Tod luxuriously on the bund of the Burra Talao, and the
spirit of the place will enter into you and you will be happy.
To enjoy life thoroughly, haste and bustle must be abandoned. Ram Baksh
has said that Englishmen are always _dikking_ to go forward, and for
this reason, though beyond doubt they pay well and readily, are not wise
men. He gave utterance to this philosophy after he had mistaken his road
and pulled up in what must have been a disused quarry hard by a
cane-field. There were patches and pockets of cultivation along the
rocky road, where men grew cotton, _til_, chillies, tobacco, and
sugar-cane. “I will get you sugar-cane,” said Ram Baksh. “Then we will
go forward, and perhaps some of these jungly fools will tell us where
the road is.” A “jungly fool,” a tender of goats, did in time appear,
but there was no hurry; the sugar-cane was sweet and purple and the sun
warm.
The Englishman lay out at high noon on the crest of a rolling upland
crowned with rock, and heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear,
the “set of the day,” which is as easily discernible as the change of
tone between the rising and the falling tide. At a certain hour the
impetus of the morning dies out, and all things, living and inanimate,
turn their thoughts to the prophecy of the coming night. The little
wandering breezes drop for a time, and, when they blow afresh, bring the
message. The “set of the day” as the loafer said, has changed, the
machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen tides of the air are
falling. The moment of the change can only be felt in the open and in
touch with the earth, and once discovered, seem to place the finder in
deep accord and fellowship with all things on the earth. Perhaps this is
why the genuine loafer, though “frequently drunk,” is “always polite to
the stranger,” and shows such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses
of mankind, black, white, or brown.
In the evening when the jackals were scuttling across the roads and the
cranes had gone to roost, came Deoli the desolate, and an unpleasant
meeting. Six days away from his kind had bred in a Cockney heart a great
desire to see an Englishman again. An elaborate loaf through the
cantonment--fifteen minutes’ walk from end to end--showed only one
distant dog-cart and a small English child with an ayah. There was grass
in the soldierly-straight roads, and some of the cross-cuts had never
been used at all from the days when the cantonment had been first laid
out. In the western corner lay the cemetery--the only carefully-tended
and newly-whitewashed thing in this God-forgotten place. Some years ago
a man had said good-bye to the Englishman; adding cheerily:--“We shall
meet again. The world’s a very little place y’know.” His prophecy was a
true one, for the two met indeed, but the prophet was lying in Deoli
Cemetery near the well, which is decorated so ecclesiastically with
funeral urns. Truly the world is a _very_ little place that a man should
so stumble upon dead acquaintances when he goes abroad.