Poor Ayah! the longer she stayed with me the more I grieved her, for I never went into an Indian cantonment without learning to like the redcoat soldiers more and more. But she never ceased to strive for my reformation. It was in Allahabad that an officer in the South Wales Borderers foolishly persisted in becoming very chummy with my small son. The result was that one day, while we were drinking tea, our four-year-old contrived to cut a slit, about two inches long, in the military trousers. Our hotel was a long way from our friend’s quarters and he looked very miserable. I called to Ayah for needle and thread. There was a gleam of triumph on her black face when she saw why they were needed. But, when I moved to repair the damage my baby had done, she snatched the thimble from my finger almost roughly.
“Don’t touch, memsahib,” she whispered hoarsely, and then, speaking with the downcast eyes of Oriental humility, “Ayah will serve the sahib.”
And so she took from me what she thought a degradation. But she did the mending very badly, and my children’s clothes could have told how really well she could sew.
Ayah was generosity incarnated, and in my moments of hospitality was always my proud assistant. But if any soldier friend broke bread with us, she had a horrid habit of keeping tally of all he ate and drank. In Muttra, a friend of my husband’s, a captain in the 7th Dragoons, knowing that we must be almost starving at the Dâk Bungalow, drove up, after our first performance, and sent in to know if he might bring in some supper. I said, “He might indeed.” The supper was in three baskets, the first filled with cold jellied meats and dainty supper sundries; the second held beer, and in the third and largest basket there was more “Perier Jouet” than we used in our week’s stay. Captain —— shared with us the supper his kind thoughtfulness had provided. When I said good-night and left the men free to smoke till daylight, Ayah rose from her post of vantage on the verandah and followed me into my room. When she had done all I needed, and I told her to put out the light and go, she paused to mutter—
“The Captain sahib drink two bottle beer, and eat three piece sanwish.”
That so amused me that I told my husband in the morning. It vexed him, and he took Ayah to task.
“Your memsahib would have had no supper if Captain —— had not put himself out to bring it,” he said.
“He is a mean sahib,” was the answer; “he bring my memsahib wine, and then he drink it. And too he smoke plenty cigarette when memsahib go. I smell him.”
I never could find out that Ayah had any cause for her dislike of the military. The disproportion between European men and women in India has not been without unpleasant results, but I am convinced that none of those results had ever touched Ayah. I believe that her feeling was the result of a fierce, protoplasmic hatred that was engermed in the nature of her ancestors, before the Mutiny. But nothing ever softened it. The history of my life in India is the history of kindness heaped upon me by soldier hands. Ayah never let that kindness move her. In Campbellpore the Colonel’s bungalow was given up to us. We were fed from the officers’ mess, the Elephants (the Elephant Battery was at Campbellpore) saluted us, and the regimental drag rushed us up and down the one sandy street. Ayah took it grimly. All over India, after we had reduced our company of twenty-seven to four, the officers, and often officers’ wives, played with us, enabling us to play Caste, Our Boys, etc., to good business, and to tarry in the pleasant cantonments. And the men—they used to make my dressing-rooms so cozy, and wait upon me hand and foot. I could fill a volume with grateful memories of the regiments in India. Ayah never wavered in her hate, and yet she was so grateful to any civilian who gave me a rose or my baby a rattle. Only one soldier ever won her liking or approval. When we went from Calcutta to Rangoon there was on board a tall, stern man with a fine face and the bearing of a chief. He was ceaselessly good to our babies, and Ayah always spoke to me of him as the “big, good sahib.” When we reached Singapore, this gentleman came one night to my husband’s dressing-room door, to offer us the first of many kind hospitalities. He was dressed in uniform, but Ayah, whom I had sent to reclaim my cold cream, knew him. She rushed back to me—
“Memsahib, memsahib, Warren sahib is a lal coatie.”