"No," D. replied; "if I gave you the word, you would shoot or take these Moplas, but in doing it you would certainly lose some of your own men. Every soldier killed means incalculable harm, and I don't intend one single life to be lost over this affair." He insisted on their merely sitting round the hill to prevent escape, and in a few days' time down came the Moplas to treat. D. talked to them, deported nobody, and for many many years there has, he told me, not been one serious case of Mopla trouble on the Malabar Coast. Well, there's nothing in that story warranting any general statement. It only shows one of the countless situations with which the Indian civil servant has to deal. The English officer was ready to risk his own and his men's lives in a moment, as he should be, and the English magistrate knew when to hold him back. Both were needed and both were there.
On my first evening in Calcutta, wishing to see the largest number of Europeans together that I could, I went to the evening service at St Paul's Cathedral. The church consists of an unusually wide nave, with a green barrelled roof studded with Tudor roses—side aisles and a tall spire at the western end. The rain had stopped and the roads were drying a little, but it was cold and raw, and many ladies were actually wearing furs! Choir-boys in violet gowns and white surplices began to congregate near the large organ at the north-east corner. Gradually the church filled. There was just a small sprinkling of Eurasians and here and there a native face, but the congregation was almost entirely European.
Hanging from the ceiling were candelabras of electric lights, but a brighter galaxy of ecclesiastical stars was shortly to appear. A Synod had been held during the previous week, and ten out of its eleven bishops took part in this service. The procession, with so many pastoral staffs, was quite an imposing one, and it was most interesting to compare the genuflexions of these people, the rich vestments, gilded staffs and various emblems of worship and authority with those of the native religions. The sermon, which was preached by the then Bishop of Calcutta, dealt largely with the allegory of the Church as the Bride of Christ, and the duties of bishops in her preparation for Marriage. It was rambling and tedious, but the choir sang well and the playing of the fine organ was admirable.
The 12th of January was the ninth day of the ten days' Hindoo festival of the Sankarati Puja. I went over to the Howrah Bridge to see the bathing. On the stone building on the right, as I looked over the bridge railing at the top of the great flight of steps, a slab is let into the wall inscribed in English:—
"This stone is dedicated by a few Englishwomen to the memory of those pilgrims, mostly women, who perished with the 'Sir John Lawrence' in the cyclone of the 25th May, 1887."
A golden-brown butterfly was settled near the stone on the grey stucco wall. The river, dirty everywhere, was here thickly strewn with floating rubbish. The whole of the steps and the edge of the river were crowded with bathers and people ministering to them—some grave and deliberate, others lively and splashing, washing their bright-coloured draperies and clothes and rubbing their own brown bodies with the sacred water.
They were Mahrattas, these people, and about the steps squatted men ready to paint the caste mark afresh upon their foreheads for a few pice. They trimmed and twisted and smoothed their hair, gazing in little looking-glasses for the final touches, and passing through the stone shelter building above the steps, put pice into a brass tray in the street, where a trunk of sandalwood was set up in plaster and four lingams, two white and two black, were heaped with marigolds and other flower garlands in an altar shaped like a well-head.
All this was, of course, going on cheek by jowl with the traffic of the town. The stream of laden bullock-carts, gharries and palkis flowed over the bridge as swiftly as the water beneath it. On the opposite, the Howrah side, are many works and factories, including the chief jute-mills. From there to Ulabaria, far down the river, there are on the Hooghly banks seventy-eight jute- and cotton-mills and presses. They have doubled during the past eight or ten years, and in the works I visited of one company some distance south of the great Howrah Railway Station, from 110 to 120 tons of sacks called gunnies and Hessian cloth are turned out daily. That company alone employs 8000 hands. I saw the great piles of raw jute in coarse strands as it comes up from the country, and the carding machines and weaving machines. For the weaving and finishing, most of the machinery comes from Dundee, and for the spinning from Leeds. Amid the ceaseless whirr, buzz and bustle of the workshops, I watched the dexterous children using their feet with almost equal skill as their hands, catching bobbins between their toes while twisting up broken threads with their fingers. I saw the main driving engines—from Hargreaves, Bolton—of 2020 horse-power, and outside in a narrow and squalid alley I saw a shrine of Juggernaut, grotesque and hideous!
I visited the great Iron Foundry of Burn & Co., who have also, 100 miles away on the East India Railway, great pottery works, whence 30-inch drain-pipes and stoneware and tesselated pavements are sent all over India. At the engineering works they employ 5000 natives and as many as sixty Europeans. Here was a batch of plate girders just finished, each 10 feet deep, the largest yet made in India. In one of the vast and deafening workshops three 10-ton overhead electric trains were moving up and down. Here were electrically-driven machines for heavy punching and shearing, and I asked the young English clerk, who was taking me round, how he liked the native people. He said:—"I like 'em well enough, but you know—the fact is—they're chronic"; and at one side of a noisy yard, on a small square landing at the top of some steps, I saw a Mohammedan at prayer.