Fields of sugar cane, ripe for the sickle, were laid low in a twinkling; houses were unroofed, and tents blown into space; huge bridges were twisted like corkscrews, and bolts weighing a ton were hurled about like cricket balls. A heavily-laden goods train, standing outside the station (as instanced by the Governor in his official report), was turned on its side, and, joy of joy, the terrible plague and its insidious germs were wafted into eternity. And when the death roll was called a few months later, what a cloud of victims did it show! Bishop Hatchard, not long arrived, whose funeral I attended; the General, who came home to die; the wives and daughters of many it is needless to recapitulate, and brave soldiers innumerable discharged as medically unfit or still sleeping in that distant oasis of the Indian Ocean.
But even this awful drama has associations that lend themselves to comedy. A representative of a Deep Sea Cable Company, who was conspicuous for his flowing mane and superabundant hair, emerged from his illness as smooth as a billiard ball, and the local snuff-coloured wig he donned to hide his nakedness was as bewildering as it was irresistible.
The coolies, too, desirous of apprising their friends in Madras of their safety, and thinking it a favourable opportunity to defraud the Revenue, would slip unstamped letters into the post, oblivious of the columns of names that appeared weekly in the local paper as not having been forwarded in consequence of insufficient postage. And then the Creoles—a snuff-and-butter combination of English, French, and Indian—desirous of airing their European pretensions, would hail one with: “Ah, the plague—we are now far from IT,” or, anxious to be polite, would add: “I have heard your name with great advantage.”
Sitting round a blazing fire some few years ago at Christmas, in the comfortable chambers (since demolished) at the corner of Hanover Square and George Street, three friends were discussing the various changes they had witnessed together in the past forty years. Not that the conversation was unattended with drawbacks, for a gang of “waits” were disseminating discord through the still hours of the night. An asthmatic harmonium was the chief culprit, and bore on its back the blasphemous inscription, “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord,” the remainder of the orchestra being a clarionet and a fiddle; all the operators had red noses, and the instruments suffered accordingly. A public-house within measurable distance may explain the welcome silence that occasionally intervened and justify the assumption that it was responsible for the discord.
Be that as it may, “The voice that breathed o’er Eden”—with whisky variations—does not lend itself to concentration of thought or deed, save of an irreverent kind, so I will conclude by describing my companions whom we’ve frequently met in our various rambles.
Of these, one was a country-looking squire with grey hair and cropped beard, who, on closer inspection, was recognisable as the wiry bruiser who had thrashed the “Kangaroo” thirty years previously at the Alhambra; the other was Bobby Shafto, still erect and soldier-like, but divested of the curly locks that had won their way into everybody’s favour a decade previously.
For Bobby had only just left the Service, after holding a series of personal staff appointments through the influence of powerful friends of the days of his youth.
So great, indeed, had been his interest at the Horse Guards that—admittedly, the worst of company officers—he was discovered to possess military talents of the highest order. He was “a born leader of men” it was asserted; he had a “capacity for organisation” and for “licking a hopeless rabble into a military force.” Had he continued soldiering he would doubtless have been covered with “orders,” appointed Governor of one of our important fortresses, given the command of an Army Corps, or created a peer—as many an amiable donkey with interest has been before and since.
But both these good fellows have since passed away, and I—only I—remain—like a modern Elijah—to commune within myself of the various incidents with which we were associated in the long-ago sixties.
THE END.