What is this odd group accentuated in the midst of all this confusion of types by a more bizarre strangeness, the quizzical fatuity and simpering idiocy of devotion—grinning shikaris from the Tibet with prayer wheels—from the lofty valleys of Baltistan and Ladakh, from Kargil and Maulbek Chamba—incredible children from the East with their rotating brass wheels, with a woman or so, proudly walking among them carrying a burden of wealth in her turquoise and carnelian encrusted pberak bound around her head and terminating in a black knotted fringe behind her neck.
And straggling on their tracks come the Malays from Pinang and Dindings, from Malaca and Singapore, the small brown men, enduring, brighteyed, straight black-haired, in jackets, trousers and sarongs—the tartan skirt fastened around the waist, and reaching to the knee—and with a raja sprinkled among them with a yellow umbrella over him, a dandy nonchalance printing his sleek cheek with dimples. And India, the nursery of religions, of dreams, of talking and sleeping and famishing men, followed, and for an instant Leacraft thought of Kim’s journey “from Umballa through Kalka and the Pinjore gardens near by up to Simla,” which Kipling told; he thought on “the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti; tier upon tier the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water channels; the chatter of the monkeys, the solemn deodars, climbing one after another, with down-drooped branches; the vista of the plains rolled far out beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga horns and the wild rush of the led horses, the halt for prayers, the evening conference by the halting places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together.”
He closed his eyes in a revery, and the next opened them upon the very thing. Here were the bullocks, the monkeys, the camels, and here too came the hulking elephants. Dravidians from the southern peninsular, in shawls; the Hill tribes, in coats; the high caste Hindus, in skirts and turbans; Mussulmen from Cashmere, and a few Indian Princes, with their suites, in a coruscation of gem stones, made up a train of spectacles that drew the eager crowds together, almost to the obliteration of the narrow string of exotics that, a little shabbily, shuffled along between them, with however the Princes on horseback or swung in state in palanquins.
But here came Egypt bearing her witness of the universality of that power which, with her, at least, had seemed to play the part of a benevolent trustee and guide. No longer the impetuous crowds crushed the line of march; behind the blaring band that now approached rode Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian army who had resumed his ancient post and from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his desire to remain there and thus efface the irreconcileable differences which had caused Lord Curzon’s retirement from India. It was a magnanimous action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in the favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with his staff, preceded, in military stateliness, and with smart precision, five regiments or groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected so as to make a bouquet of colors, but essentially business like also in their serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the point of affectation by the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of the hosts of people on the streets, and protruding from every point above them. There were Arab lancers—in light blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily travel, the bodies of the camel corps, with the blackest type of men in the Sudanese infantry regiments, assimilating to the soil of the desert in the color of their khaki costume, and then other details of the military organization, gleaming in immaculate white trousers and coats. It was unmistakably effective, and it imparted moral strength to this illimitable advertisement of physical power. It recalled the campaigns of Khartum and Omdurman, and memorialized that time-worn boast of the English rehabilitation of Egypt; a fact certainly, but not to be distinguished as a very incredible achievement.
The spectacle closed with Zulus and Hottentots, the bushmen of Australia, some dejected New Zealanders, and a picturesque assortment of Jamaican negroes, who tramped along with amusement in their staring eyes, and a raggedness of deportment, reflecting the wasteful and careless way of the tropics. Nor were there wanting Greeks from Cyprus. And at the last the loyalty of the Colonies was splendidly emphasized, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Natal, Bermuda, the Bahamas, contributed a final burst of patriotic zeal, and seemed to open the wide earth, to their kindred in the English island, for home-making and re-establishment. Nor was the show of devotion fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere. It represented a sudden rapprochement, an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and support. Nothing had ever happened in the history of the English people, which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into each other’s arms, and in a great peril summoned to the surface the inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts, and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realised. Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of Hope, lit up by the imaginative flamings of Ambition, almost at times, at this dread moment, gave to the future in the new habitations awaiting them, an unexpected salubrity and beauty. The English leaders dreamed of new achievements, a new literature, a greatness vastly exceeding all historic records.
Three days after the parade, which Leacraft saw so magniloquently evolved in the streets of London, at Tilbury, the King left English soil, to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills, the fields, the shores, were all too contracted to hold the army and the people, gathered in one sublime throb of loyalty and affection to witness the inexpressible event. The King wearing the uniform of a Field Marshall issued from a royal tent and with uncovered head moved towards the shore where his barge was moored. The moment was statuesque; the immeasurable multitude with a wave of heart breaking emotion uncovered; the national hymn played by a string and wind orchestra of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing tide of song. Amid the surges of vocal outpouring the parks of artillery belched their resounding salutes, the lines of war vessels with their crews at attention returned the iron throated call, and the King standing below the sweeping oars, turned for an instant towards the shore, and then regained his first posture of immovable fixture upon the pregnable sides of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those fateful oarsmen was swiftly sending him.
The suspense was insupportable, the poignant crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicament of a nation bodily leaving its birth place, stunned the crowds, and in silence with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the populace stood, dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic as the herding cows.
Then at sunfall the Dreadnought, followed by an escort of cruisers heavily churned the waters, and passed down the Thames, from its mouth into the Channel, and so on to the open sea, and with it went the concentrated expression of the Idea of the English empire—the King. How strangely immobile is Nature! A race which had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry, wrought from the imagery in nature’s picture-book, which had spent its brain and industry in winning for nature new devotees, and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had enthroned among its chiefest charms its surrender to the control of nature, in this hour of torturing doubt, disenthronement and eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly. The sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor, and the moon-illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no reflection in the august calmness and serenity of Nature. “Its withers were unwrung.” Enveloped in the processes of decay and change, the lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution to the chronicle of destroyed continents, and shattered worlds. There was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of a sentiment, or an idea, or moral regime. Nothing short of a change in atmospheric pressure would bring tears to its face, or agony in its deportment. And what in any case was this desertion of a land, the removal of a people? It was subordinated to fluctuations of an oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the crust of the earth. It was a part of the huge drama part of the inlaid order of things, as determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping the world, and all things in it, were inaugurated. Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone or come. Why in the aeons gone and the aeons yet to come should the migration of a people, or the emptying of a vestige of the earth’s surface merit notice? And so the elements did not hasten to weep, or storm, or furiously proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their old time sweetness.
Thus it happened, but from the mouth of men and women, and prompted deeply in their yearning soul, rose clouds of prayers that night, for the safety of the King, and ever and anon as troops marched over the roads in the cold summer night the hymn:
Lord of the Wave and Deep,