CHAPTER XXIX
ON THE HIMALAYAS
From Tokio we turned back. Again we stayed in Yokohama, in Kobe, and stopped just long enough to play once in Nagasaki. We spent some time at Hong-Kong. At Penang our boat waited a day, and our English friends came aboard to wish us God-speed. The man we had known best and liked most was not among them. I had named him “Saint of the Camera.” He was a capital amateur photographer, and had tramped about Penang most generously for me when we had been there before, and had fed with innumerable pretty photographs my insatiable craving for “views.” I asked where he was. Alas! he was in the English Hospital, fighting a desperate fight with the fever-fiend.
“I wish that you were as rich as Monte Christo,” I had said to my husband the first evening that we were in Penang.
“Why?” he said, as in duty bound.
“Because then you could buy me this island, and we would stay here for ever.”
“Oh, would we? Well, then, I’m glad that I’m considerably less well off than Monte Christo,” said mine lord, who decidedly prefers Europe to Asia.
Penang is said by some authorities to be the site of the Garden of Eden. Certainly no paradise could be lovelier. Nature laughs and revels in Penang; and there, too, is native life most varied, most picturesque. A dozen different races live in Penang. Their places of worship, their houses, their garments, are insistently differentiated. Penang is one big garden of exotics; among them, we found one sweet home-rose—the rose of English hospitality. From Penang we went to Singapore.
I have no pleasanter memories than my memories of Singapore. No place could be more beautiful, nor more interesting; and I thought that nowhere in the East was there such pleasant European society. And surely no other spot on earth is such a paradise of fruit.
Singapore is a place of splendid varieties. It is the island of a great future.
The Malays are perhaps the least vivid feature of Singapore. They are an inoffensive people, but not, I thought, as interesting as the other Oriental peoples. Chinese industry and European intelligence were the great motive powers at Singapore.
Tanglin, outside the town of Singapore, is an ideal barrack. It was a soldier’s paradise I thought.
Singapore, with its wonderful mixture of races, was strangely fascinating, even to people who had been through the East rather exhaustively; but I doubt if we should remember Singapore half so pleasantly, did we not remember it as the residence of Sir Charles Warren.
If I felt free to glide into purely personal reminiscences, I should record of Singapore that there we greatly liked a man, and greatly thanked a host.
On our way to China we had spent a month or more in Singapore. Now we passed a few more pleasant weeks there. Then came a few sad days in Rangoon and a memorable passage back to Calcutta. It was late in July and the elements were in indescribable confusion. Only an expert could tell which was sky and which was sea. And neither sea nor sky could have been uglier.
NATIVES READING AT PENANG. Page 256.
We lost a great number of sheep overboard in the storm; and I, too, very nearly went overboard. I should have deserved my fate; but the poor innocent sheep did not deserve theirs. Yet perhaps it is pleasanter to die by drowning than by slaughter. I love the deck of a boat, but I hate the “down below.” I never go below more than is absolutely necessary. But on this trip I had my own way once too often. I don’t know how I had inveigled the Captain, but I had. My steamer chair was lashed to the hatch. I was snug and dry under my rugs. The ship rolled and pitched splendidly, the rain rushed down in nasty torrents, and the salt spray curled and split into a hundred whipcords, before it struck my face.
The Captain and my captain came up every few moments to reason with me and to invite me down, but I shook my wilful head at them. The night, the storm, and the fresh, angry air, seemed to me far more pleasant than the close, warm, sociable saloon would have been.
About ten o’clock John came up and made, with difficulty, his frightened way to my side.
“Master say you want something? Please he like come bring you down. It is very late.”
“All right, I’ll come down with you, John,” I said.
“Oh no, memsahib, please not,” cried John, “Master be very angry. It want two gentlemen help you this bad night.”
Some imp of contrariness possessed me. I was cross at having to go down at all; and I answered John roughly. “Bring the rugs,” I said, “and I’ll come by myself, if you are afraid to help me.” Poor John, he was afraid to help himself; and, in sooth, we had a very staggery time of it between the steamer chair and the gangway. But we grasped the brass rod at last and went slowly, and, as I thought, surely down. How often we are most in danger when we think that danger is over! I was on the last step when a lurch more tremendous than all the tremendous others tore the brass rod from my hand, and I lay across the saloon doorway, a rather mangled mass of wilful woman.
I had interrupted a game of whist. I was rather badly hurt, but they were all very good to me; even the Captain and the long-suffering husband, both of whom I had defied by staying on deck, through the storm, and both of whom I had disobeyed by coming below without their help.
There was a young army surgeon on board; I forget his name, but I shall always remember him. He had been invalided home from Mandalay. He was seriously ill; but he left his state-room and came to mine. I shall never forget how very ill he looked as he bent over my rather badly cut eye. I am sure that he was far worse than I was, but he saved me from the full consequences of my folly; and he looked so very white and spent that I forgot to moan, and let my fancy wander to a score of battlefields where unselfish medicos have won their Victoria Crosses; and before my mind had quite come back my eye was mended.
Our second season in Calcutta was delightful, but warm. “Cinch, cinch,” was our constant cry; which meant that we wanted the punkah-wallahs to pull harder.
Punkahs are the puissant antidotes of the Indian climate. They are not always needed, nor everywhere; but when they are needed, they are needed badly! There are two kinds of punkahs—hand punkahs, and the long canvas punkahs that hang from the ceiling and are pulled by the coolies, who sit in the hall or in an outer room. The hand punkahs are huge fans, made of palm leaves, and swung near your face, by the tireless arms of indefatigable punkah-wallahs.
Some of the hand punkahs are very beautiful. In Calcutta, at the theatre, I was kept cool by the breath of a big Egyptian-shaped thing that was inlaid with bits of brilliantly-hued glass. In Rawal Pindi I was cooled by the breeze of a square of scented grass. In Patiala the servants of the Maharajah fanned me with wire-outlined, leaf-fringed, sandalwood-sprinkled ovals of crimson silk.
In every part of India I bought, for a few pies, in the native bazaars, the common fans of the people. I don’t suppose that my entire collection cost me ten pounds. But to me they are full of interest and of story, those crude fans of the Asiatic populace. That plaited, vivid one means Allahabad to me. That little, useless-looking, spangled one I bought almost at the base of Mount Everest. There was small need for fans there; but fans are a matter of course in Asia, and custom is greater than necessity. For every Oriental city or town in which I have slept I have a fan.
The genii of this world are limited in number. I knew one of them in Calcutta; he was an old, poor Hindoo. He had his price (as most of us have); and it was two annas from sunrise to sunrise. I gave him three annas, and only claimed his services from 8 P.M. till 12 P.M. I think he loved me. He could only do one thing, but he did it perfectly. Our second season in Calcutta was, beyond expression, hot. It was indecently hot. But, whatever the rest of the world suffered, from 8 P.M. until midnight I was cool and happy. To write more correctly, I was cooled and kept happy. The one thing that my meagrely-clad brown genius could do, was fan; and he did it. From the moment I stepped from the gharri into the stage doorway of the Theatre Royal, Calcutta, I was surrounded by the perfection of breeze.
There were moments incidental to my changes of costume when I had to temporarily banish him from my dressing-room. He always resented this; he seemed to feel it a reflection upon his fanning. To tell the truth, I often felt rather supercilious; for, though he never ceased to fan me, he was more often asleep than awake. I usually had to waken him before I ejected him.
We played The Lights o’ London in terrible weather. My third dress was a warm gray gown, and over it I wore a warmer gray cloak and hood. I don’t know how the old man managed it, but he did manage always to crawl behind the canvas rocks; and while I sat, a melting mass of cross feminality, he fanned and fanned me. When I moved, he moved; wherever I stood, he stood behind me; and whether the audience appreciated or underrated my genius, he never ceased to fan me. A friend, a dear friend, was kind enough to tell me that in Bombay I played Bess Marks very much worse than I had in Calcutta. I attributed it entirely to the absence of my punkah-wallah.
I have never had a more devoted servant. When he could not by any possible contrivance fan me, he used to go and fan my husband. I wonder if he had read a book entitled, Love me, Love my Husband.
When we went into the Punjab, the punkahs—the big punkahs swung from the ceiling—that had been a luxury became a necessity. Not a necessity to comfort, but to life. But before we went into the Punjab we went up on the Himalayas.
My lines of life have crossed and recrossed the globe, up and down. I shall always think of the Himalayas as Nature’s masterpiece. I shall not try to describe them: my failure would be too great.
We crept to the Himalayas from Calcutta—crept through pleasant, native places, across the Ganges, up the most wonderful of railways. It seems profane to speak of man’s achievement and of the Himalayas at the same time; but the difficulties that Nature has thrown in the way of the Darjeeling railway make its accomplishment a thing sublime. Engineering may have had greater triumphs, but it has had none that are more greatly displayed.
Our train turned upon itself and crossed its own tracks like a mad, hunted thing. It seemed to take most desperate chances; but still it went on and up; and man’s mind triumphed over Nature’s matter.
Alas that three score years and ten should mark the average limit of so stupendous a triumph! And yet if, as some of us think, man’s mind is but a form of Nature’s matter, it is only meet that our active, nervous personalities should be reabsorbed into the great, quiet, placid, potent whole of Nature.
The colour-rich pen of William Shakespeare would, I think, have found itself inadequate to paint the scenery through which we passed from the banks of the Ganges to the base of Mount Everest. All I can say of that scenery is: It is there; go and see it!
We passed groups of hill people. They were to us a new type of Asiatic humanity. They reminded us strangely and strongly of our own North American Indians. They set us thinking. We tried to recall all we had ever read about the cradle of the Aryan race. We tried to remember the great racial divisions of humanity. And when we found ourselves in a fine mental tangle we gave it up, saying, “What a great and undeniable fact is the brotherhood of all humanity!” and then we ceased to think and only looked—at Nature. We passed through tea plantations, and through miles of cochineal and indigo; that relieved our tension and told us once more that ours was the most practical race in the world; for the plantations were, almost without exception, owned and managed by Anglo-Saxons.
Before we reached Darjeeling we had several sunlit views of the far, snow-covered heights of the great mountains. From Darjeeling we saw them every day—for at Darjeeling we had only sunshine and good fortune. We saw Mount Kinchinjunga at sunrise, at sunflood, and at sunset. We could not see Mount Everest from Darjeeling, but before daylight one morning we went together on horseback and crept to the base of Mount Everest; we lifted our faces reverently and looked upon it.
Darjeeling fascinated me as much because of the hill tribes we found there as for its own wonderful beauty. My husband says that I ruined him in furs and phulkaris, but he has accused me of ruining him in every bazaar in the Orient; and now that we are at home in London, he has quite constituted himself the curator of my curios.
At Darjeeling is one of the lovely homes of those very interesting people, the Maharajah and Maharanee of Cooch Behar.
The Maharajah of Cooch Behar was the handsomest man I ever saw. But I did not discover it the first time I saw him. The Maharanee was with him, and I had no eyes for any one else. The Maharanee of Cooch Behar is indescribably lovely. No intense poem of old Oriental literature contains a description of woman’s loveliness, that would be an exaggeration if it had been written about her Highness. In Calcutta and in Darjeeling she and her husband came to see us play very often. Whenever they came, I used to scurry through my changes that I might stand at the peep-hole and look upon the exquisite Eastern beauty of the Maharanee. The Maharajah I first saw, without his wife, at the Calcutta Races; then I realised what a handsome husband his handsome wife had. Naturally enough, the Cooch Behar children are exceptionally pretty. It was in Darjeeling that I used to see them. The Maharajah of Cooch Behar and his wife stand for all that is best and wisest in Indian life. Their culture is broadly cosmopolitan, their loyalty to their own people is deep and tireless, but not pedantic nor narrow. They adore and adorn the country of their birth. They greatly credit the country of their allegiance.
We went from Darjeeling back to Calcutta. Then we went to Bombay, stopping a week or more at Allahabad and Jubblepore. I revelled again in the native quarters; we were made very happy at night in the theatres, and in the cantonments we met a lot of charming English people. I often wonder how many thousands of charming English people there are in India. There are very many, I know.
Bombay I always associate with Tokio and Vienna. They are the three most lavish cities I have ever seen. And yet, Bombay lacked to me something of the charm of Calcutta. Bombay is undoubtedly the more beautiful of the two cities, but it is far the less dense. Humanity fascinates me more than Nature. I boast of being cosmopolitan. I love several countries as much as, or more than, my own, and yet, the cosmopolitanism of Bombay oppressed me. The cosmos seemed to me objectionably conglomerate. But Bombay was delightful; its shortcomings were very few, its charms were very, very many. Must I leave Bombay—the Queen of the Eastern seas—with a sentence? Perhaps as well leave it that way as another, since I cannot devote the pages of a volume to its praise. The swarming, native quarters, the beautifully-built European section, the pretty Parsi women, the changeable silks and the inch-thick rugs of the borri wallahs, the bright-blue, glistening, dancing bay, the dank recesses of the Elephanta caves, the vultures on the Parsi Towers of Silence, call out to me for recognition. But there is a nineteenth century full to overflowing of tourists to recall them all, better, perhaps, than I could, but not more lovingly than I should—had I the space and the power to more than mention them.
If I filled one page with each golden memory I have of the Orient, those pages would, though they were printed on tissue, make a rather thick volume.
HILL PEOPLE—BHOOTEAS AND NEPAULESE. Page 264.