FOLLOWING THE EQUATORCHAPTER I.
A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
starting point of this lecturing-trip around the
world
was Paris, where we had been living a year
or two.
We sailed for America, and there made certain preparations.
This took but little time. Two members of my
family elected to go with me. Also a
carbuncle. The dictionary
says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out
of place in a dictionary.
We started westward from New York in midsummer,
with Major Pond to manage the
platform-business as far as
the Pacific. It was warm work, all the way, and the last
fortnight of it was suffocatingly smoky, for in Oregon and
British Columbia the
forest fires were raging. We had an
added week of smoke at the seaboard, where we were
obliged
to wait awhile for our ship. She had been getting herself
ashore in the
smoke, and she had to be docked and repaired.
We sailed at last; and so ended a
snail-paced march across the
continent, which had lasted forty days.
We moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and
sparkling summer sea; an
enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and
apparently a welcome sea to all on board; it
certainly was to
me, after the distressful dustings and smokings and swelterings
of the past weeks. The voyage would furnish a three-weeks
holiday, with hardly a break in it. We had the whole Pacific
Ocean in front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and
be comfortable. The
city of Victoria was
twinkling dim in the
deep heart
of her
smoke-cloud,
and
getting ready to
vanish; and now
we closed the field-glasses
and sat
down on our
steamer chairs contented and at peace. But they went to
wreck and ruin under us and brought us to shame before all
the passengers. They had been furnished by the largest furniture-dealing
house in Victoria, and were worth a couple of
farthings a dozen, though they had cost us the price of honest
chairs. In the Pacific and Indian Oceans one must still bring
his own deck-chair on board or go without, just as in the old
forgotten Atlantic times—those Dark Ages of sea travel.
EVEN THE GULLS SMILED.
Ours was a reasonably comfortable ship, with the customary
sea-going fare—plenty of good food furnished by the
Deity and cooked by
the devil. The discipline observable on
board was perhaps as good as it is anywhere in
the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. The ship was not very well arranged for tropi-
cal service; but that is nothing, for this is the rule for ships
which ply in the tropics. She had an over-supply of cockroaches,
but this is also the rule with ships doing business
in the summer seas—at least such as have been long in service.
Our young captain was a very handsome man, tall and perfectly
formed, the very figure to show up a smart uniform's
finest effects. He was a man
of the best intentions, and was
polite and courteous even to courtliness. There was a
soft
grace and finish about his manners which made whatever place
he happened to
be in seem for the moment a drawing-room.
He avoided the smoking-room. He had no vices.
He did not
smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff; he did not swear, or use
slang, or
rude, or coarse, or indelicate language, or make puns,
or tell anecdotes, or laugh
intemperately, or raise his voice
above the moderate pitch enjoined by the canons of
good form.
When he gave an order, his manner modified it into a request.
After
dinner he and his officers joined the ladies and gentlemen
in the ladies' saloon, and shared in the singing and piano
playing, and helped
turn the music. He had a sweet and
sympathetic tenor voice, and used it with taste and
effect.
After the music he played whist there, always with the same
partner and
opponents, until the ladies' bedtime. The electric
lights burned there as late as the
ladies and their friends might
desire, but they were not allowed to burn in the
smoking-room
after eleven. There were many laws on the ship's statute
book, of
course; but so far as I could see, this and one other
were the only ones that were
rigidly enforced. The captain
explained that he enforced this one because his own cabin
adjoined the smoking-room, and the smell of tobacco smoke
made him sick. I did not
see how our smoke could reach him,
for the smoking-room and his cabin were on the upper
deck,
targets for all the winds that blew; and besides there was no
crack of
communication between them, no opening of any sort
in the solid intervening bulkhead. Still, to a delicate stomach
even imaginary smoke can convey damage.
The captain, with his gentle nature, his polish, his sweetness,
his moral and verbal purity, seemed pathetically out of
place in
his rude and autocratic vocation. It seemed another
instance of the irony of fate.
He was going home under a cloud. The passengers knew
about his trouble, and were sorry
for him. Approaching
Vancouver through a narrow and difficult passage densely
befogged with smoke from the forest fires, he had had the ill-luck
to lose his bearings and get his ship on the rocks. A
matter like this would rank
merely as an error with you and
me; it ranks as a crime with the directors of steamship
companies.
The captain had been tried by the Admiralty
Court
at Vancouver, and its verdict had acquitted him of blame.
But that was
insufficient comfort. A sterner court would examine
the case in Sydney—the Court of Directors, the lords
of a company in
whose ships the captain had served as mate
a number of years. This was his first voyage
as captain.
The officers of our ship were hearty and companionable
young men, and they entered
into the general amusements and
helped the passengers pass the time. Voyages in the
Pacific
and Indian Oceans are but pleasure excursions for all hands.
Our purser
was a young Scotchman who was equipped with a
grit that was remarkable. He was an
invalid, and looked it,
as far as his body was concerned, but illness could not subdue
his spirit. He was full of life, and had a gay and capable
tongue. To all
appearances he was a sick man without being
aware of it, for he did not talk about his
ailments, and his
bearing and conduct were those of a person in robust health;
yet
he was the prey, at intervals, of ghastly sieges of pain in
his heart. These lasted many
hours, and while the attack continued
he could neither sit nor lie. In one instance he stood
on his feet twenty-four hours fighting for his life with these
sharp agonies, and yet was as full of life and cheer and activity
the next day as if nothing had happened.
The brightest passenger in the ship, and the most interesting
and felicitous talker, was a young Canadian who was not
able to let the whisky
bottle alone. He was of a rich and
powerful family, and could have had a distinguished
career
and abundance of effective help toward it if he could have
conquered his
appetite for drink; but he could not do it, so his
great equipment of talent was of no
use to him. He had often
taken the pledge to drink no more, and was a good sample of
what that sort of unwisdom can do for a man—for a man
with anything
short of an iron will. The system is wrong in
two ways: it does not strike at the root
of the trouble, for one
thing, and to make a pledge of any kind
is to declare war
against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking
and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.
I have said that the system does not strike at the root of
the trouble, and I venture
to repeat that. The root is not the
drinking, but the desire to drink. These are
very different
things. The one merely requires will—and a great deal of it,
both as to bulk and staying capacity—the other merely requires
watchfulness—and for no long time. The desire of
course precedes the
act, and should have one's first attention;
it can do but little good to refuse the act
over and over again,
always leaving the desire unmolested, unconquered; the desire
will continue to assert itself, and will be almost sure to win in
the long run. When the
desire intrudes, it should be at once
banished out of the mind. One should be on the
watch for it
all the time—otherwise it will get in. It
must be taken in
time and not allowed to get a lodgment. A desire constantly
repulsed for a fortnight should die, then. That should cure
the drinking habit. The
system of refusing the mere act of
drinking, and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent
war tactics, it seems to me.
I used to take pledges—and soon violate them. My will
was not strong, and I
could not help it. And then, to be tied
in any way naturally irks an otherwise free
person and makes
him chafe in his bonds and want to get his liberty. But when
I
finally ceased from taking definite pledges, and merely resolved
that I would kill an injurious desire, but leave myself
free to resume the desire
and the habit whenever I should
choose to do so, I had no more trouble. In five days I
drove
out the desire to smoke and was not obliged to keep watch
after that; and I
never experienced any strong desire to smoke
again. At the end of a year and a quarter
of idleness I began
to write a book, and presently found that the pen was strangely
reluctant to go. I tried a smoke to see if that would help me
out of the
difficulty. It did. I smoked eight or ten cigars
and as many pipes a day for five
months; finished the book,
and did not smoke again until a year had gone by and another
book had to be begun.
I can quit any of my nineteen injurious habits at any time,
and without discomfort or
inconvenience. I think that the
Dr. Tanners and those others who go forty days without
eating do it by resolutely keeping out the desire to eat, in the
beginning; and
that after a few hours the desire is discouraged
and comes no more.
Once I tried my scheme in a large medical way. I had
been confined to my bed several
days with lumbago. My case
refused to improve. Finally the doctor said,—
"My remedies have no fair chance. Consider what they
have to fight, besides the
lumbago. You smoke extravagantly,
don't you?"
"Yes."
"You take coffee immoderately?"
"Yes."
"And some tea?"
"Yes."
"You eat all kinds of things that are dissatisfied with
each other's company?"
"Yes."
"You drink two hot Scotches every night?"
"Yes."
"Very well, there you see what I have to contend
against. We can't make progress the
way the matter
stands. You must make a reduction in these things; you
must cut
down your consumption of them considerably for
some days."
"I can't, doctor."
"Why can't you."
"I lack the will-power. I can cut them off entirely, but I
can't merely moderate
them."
He said that that would answer, and said he would come
around in twenty-four hours and
begin work again. He was
taken ill himself and could not come; but I did not need
him. I cut off all those things for two days and nights; in
fact, I cut off all kinds of
food, too, and all drinks except
water, and at the end of the forty-eight hours the
lumbago
was discouraged and left me. I was a well man; so I gave
thanks and took
to those delicacies again.
It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended
it to a lady. She had run down
and down and down, and
had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had
any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her
upon her feet in a week. It
brightened her up, it filled her
with hope, and she said she would do everything I told
her
to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and
smoking and eating
for four days, and then she would be all
right again. And it would have happened just so, I know
it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking,
and drinking, because she had never done those
things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and
hadn't any. Now that they would have come good, there
were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She
was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard
and
lighten ship
withal. Why,
even one or
two little bad
habits could
have saved
her, but she
was just a
moral pauper.
When she
could have acquired
them
she was dissuaded
by her parents, who were ignorant people though
reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now.
It seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These
things ought to be attended to while a person is young;
otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual
to fight them with.
"WHEN I WAS A YOUTH."
When I was a youth I used to take all kinds of pledges,
and do my best to keep them,
but I never could, because
I didn't strike at the root of the habit—the desire; I generally
broke down within the month. Once I tried
limiting a habit.
That worked tolerably well for a while. I pledged myself to
smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until
bedtime, then I had a
luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted
me every day and all day long; so, within the week I
found myself hunting for
larger cigars than I had been used
to smoke; then larger ones still, and still larger
ones. Within
the fortnight I was getting cigars made for
me—on a yet
larger pattern. They still grew and grew in size. Within
the month my cigar had grown to such proportions that I
could have used it as a crutch.
It now seemed to me that a
one-cigar limit was no real protection to a person, so I
knocked
my pledge on the head and resumed my liberty.
To go back to that young Canadian. He was a "remittance
man," the first one I had ever seen or heard of. Passengers
explained the term to me. They said that dissipated ne'er-do-weels
belonging to important families in England and Canada
were not cast off by their
people while there was any hope of
reforming them, but when that last hope perished at
last, the
ne'er-do-weel was sent abroad to get him out of the way. He
was shipped
off with just enough money in his pocket—no, in
the purser's
pocket—for the needs of the voyage—and when
he reached his
destined port he would find a remittance awaiting
him there. Not a large one, but just enough to keep him
a month. A similar
remittance would come monthly thereafter.
It was the
remittance-man's custom to pay his month's
board and lodging straightway—a
duty which his landlord
did not allow him to forget—then spree away the rest
of his
money in a single night, then brood and mope and grieve in
idleness till
the next remittance came. It is a pathetic life.
We had other remittance-men on board, it was said. At
least they said they were R. M. 's. There were two. But they
did not resemble the
Canadian; they lacked his tidiness, and
his brains, and his gentlemanly ways, and his
resolute spirit,
and his humanities and generosities. One of them was a lad
of
nineteen or twenty, and he was a good deal of a ruin, as to
clothes, and morals, and
general aspect. He said he was a
scion of a ducal house in England, and had been shipped
to
Canada for the house's relief, that he had fallen into trouble
there, and was
now being shipped to Australia. He said he
had no title. Beyond this remark he was
economical of the
truth. The first thing he did in Australia was to get into the
lockup, and the next thing he did was to proclaim himself an
earl in the police court in
the morning and fail to prove it.
CHAPTER II.
When in doubt, tell the truth. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
four days out from Victoria we plunged into hot
weather, and all the male passengers put on white
linen clothes. One or two days later
we crossed the
25th parallel of north latitude, and then, by order, the officers
of the ship laid away their blue uniforms and came out in
white linen ones. All the
ladies were in white by this time.
This prevalence of snowy costumes gave the promenade
deck
an invitingly cool and cheerful and picnicky aspect.
From my diary:
There are several sorts of ills in the world from which a
person can never escape
altogether, let him journey as far as
he will. One escapes from one breed of an ill only
to encounter
another breed of it. We have come far from the
snake liar and the fish liar, and
there was rest and peace in the
thought; but now we have reached the realm of the boomerang
liar, and sorrow is with us once more. The first officer
has seen a man try to
escape from his enemy by getting behind
a tree; but the enemy sent his boomerang sailing
into the sky
far above and beyond the tree; then it turned, descended, and
killed
the man. The Australian passenger has seen this thing
done to two men, behind two
trees—and by the one arrow.
This being received with a large silence that
suggested doubt,
he buttressed it with the statement that his brother once saw
the
boomerang kill a bird away off a hundred yards and bring
it to the
thrower. But these are ills which must be borne.
There is no other way.
The talk passed from the boomerang to dreams—usually
a fruitful subject,
afloat or ashore—but this time the output
was poor. Then it passed to
instances of extraordinary
memory—with better results. Blind Tom, the negro
pianist,
was spoken of, and it was said that he could accurately play
any piece of
music, howsoever long and difficult, after hearing
it once; and that six months later he
could accurately play it
again, without having touched it in the interval. One of the
most striking of the stories told was furnished by a gentleman
who had served on
the staff of the Viceroy of India. He
read the details from his note-book, and explained
that he had
written them down, right after the consummation of the incident
which they described, because he thought that if he did
not put them down in black
and white he might presently
come to think he had dreamed them or invented them.
The Viceroy was making a progress, and among the shows
offered by the Maharajah of
Mysore for his entertainment was
a memory-exhibition. The Viceroy and thirty gentlemen
of
his suite sat in a row, and the memory-expert, a high-caste
Brahmin, was
brought in and seated on the floor in front of
them. He said he knew but two languages,
the English and
his own, but would not exclude any foreign tongue from the
tests
to be applied to his memory. Then he laid before the
assemblage his program—a
sufficiently extraordinary one.
He proposed that one gentleman should give him one word
of
a foreign sentence, and tell him its place in the sentence. He
was furnished
with the French word est, and was told it was
second in a
sentence of three words. The next gentleman
gave him the German word verloren and said it was the third
in a sentence of four words. He asked the next
gentleman
for one detail in a sum in addition; another for one detail in a
sum of
subtraction; others for single details in mathematical
problems of various kinds; he got
them. Intermediates gave
him single words from sentences in Greek, Latin, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, and other languages, and told him their
places in the sentences. When at last every body had furnished
him a single rag from a foreign sentence or a figure
from a problem, he went over the ground again, and got a
second word and a second figure and was told their places in
the sentences and the sums; and so on and so on. He went
over the ground again and again until he had collected all the
parts of the sums and all the parts of the sentences—and all
in disorder, of course, not in their proper rotation. This had
occupied two hours.
The Brahmin now sat silent and thinking, a while, then
began and repeated all the
sentences, placing the words in
their proper order, and untangled the disordered
arithmetical
problems and gave accurate answers to them all.
In the beginning he had asked the company to throw
almonds at him during the two
hours, he to remember how
many each gentleman had thrown; but none were thrown, for
the Viceroy said that the test would be a sufficiently severe
strain without
adding that burden to it.
General Grant had a fine memory for all kinds of things,
including even names and
faces, and I could have furnished
an instance of it if I had thought of it. The first
time I
ever saw him was early in his first term as President. I had
just arrived
in Washington from the Pacific coast, a stranger
and wholly unknown to the public, and
was passing the White
House one morning when I met a friend, a Senator from
Nevada. He asked me if I would like to see the President.
I said I should be very glad;
so we entered. I supposed that the
President would be in the midst of a crowd, and that
I could
look at him in peace and security from a distance, as another
stray cat
might look at another king. But it was in the
morning, and the Senator was using a
privilege of his office
Which I had not heard of—the privilege of intruding upon
the Chief Magistrate's working hours. Before I knew it, the
Senator and I were in the presence, and there was none there
but we three. General Grant got slowly up from his table,
put his pen down, and stood before me with the iron expression
of a man who had not smiled for seven years, and was not
intending to smile for another seven. He looked me steadily
in the eyes—mine lost confidence and fell. I had never confronted
a great man before, and was in a miserable state of
funk and inefficiency. The Senator said:—
"Mr. President, may I have the privilege of introducing
Mr. Clemens?"
The President gave my hand an unsympathetic wag and
dropped it. He did not say a word
but just stood. In my
trouble I could not think of anything to say, I merely wanted
to resign. There was an awkward pause, a dreary pause, a
horrible pause. Then I
thought of something, and looked up
into that unyielding face, and said
timidly:—
"Mr. President, I—I am embarrassed. Are you?"
His face broke—just a little—a wee glimmer, the
momentary
flicker of a summer-lightning smile, seven years
ahead of time—and I was out
and gone as soon as it was.
Ten years passed away before I saw him the second time.
Meantime I was become better
known; and was one of the
people appointed to respond to toasts at the banquet given
to General Grant in Chicago by the Army of the Tennessee
when he came back from
his tour around the world. I arrived
late at night and got up late in the morning. All
the corridors
of the hotel were crowded with people waiting to get
a glimpse of General Grant
when he should pass to the place
whence he was to review the great procession. I worked
my
way by the suite of packed drawing-rooms, and at the corner
of the house I
found a window open where there was a roomy
AN AWKWARD PAUSE.
platform decorated with flags, and carpeted. I stepped out on
it, and saw below me millions of people blocking all the streets,
and other millions caked together in all the windows and on
all the house-tops around. These masses took me for General
Grant, and broke into volcanic explosions and cheers; but
it was a good place to see the procession, and I stayed.
Presently I heard the distant blare of military music, and far
up the street I saw the procession come in sight, cleaving its
way through the huzzaing multitudes, with Sheridan, the most
martial figure of the War, riding at its head in the dress
uniform of a Lieutenant-General.
And now General Grant, arm-in-arm with Major Carter
Harrison, stepped out on the
platform, followed two and two
by the badged and uniformed reception committee. General
Grant was looking exactly as he had looked upon that trying
occasion of ten years
before—all iron and bronze self-possession.
Mr. Harrison came over and led me to the General and
formally introduced me. Before I
could put together the
proper remark, General Grant said—
"Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed. Are you?"—and
that little seven-year
smile twinkled across his face again.
Seventeen years have gone by since then, and to-day, in
New York, the streets are a
crush of people who are there to
honor the remains of the great soldier as they pass to
their
final resting-place under the monument; and the air is heavy
with dirges and
the boom of artillery, and all the millions of
America are thinking of the man who
restored the Union and
the flag, and gave to democratic government a new lease of
life, and, as we may hope and do believe, a permanent place
among the beneficent
institutions of men.
We had one game in the ship which was a good timepasser—at
least it was at night in the smoking-room when
the men were getting freshened up
from the day's monotonies
and dullnesses. It was the completing of non-complete stories.
That is to say, a man would tell all of a story except the
finish, then the others would try to supply the ending out
of their own invention. When every one who wanted a
chance had had it, the man who had introduced the story
would give it its original ending—then you could take your
choice. Sometimes the new endings turned out to be better
than the old one. But the story which called out the most
persistent and determined and ambitious effort was one which
had no ending, and so there was nothing to compare the new-made
endings with. The man who told it said he could
furnish the particulars up to a certain point only, because that
was as much of the tale as he knew. He had read it in a
volume of sketches twenty-five years ago, and was interrupted
before the end was reached. He would give any one fifty
dollars who would finish the story to the satisfaction of a jury
to be appointed by ourselves. We appointed a jury and
wrestled with the tale. We invented plenty of endings, but
the jury voted them all down. The jury was right. It was a
tale which the author of it may possibly have completed satisfactorily,
and if he really had that good fortune I would like
to know what the ending was. Any ordinary man will find
that the story's strength is in its middle, and that there is
apparently no way to transfer it to the close, where of course
it ought to be. In substance the storiette was as follows:
John Brown, aged thirty-one, good, gentle, bashful, timid, lived in a quiet
village in
Missouri. He was superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday-school.
It was but a humble distinction; still, it was his only official
one,
and he was modestly proud of it and was devoted to its work and its interests.
The extreme kindliness of his nature was recognized by all; in fact, people
said
that he was made entirely out of good impulses and bashfulness; that he
could always be
counted upon for help when it was needed, and for bashfulness
both when it was needed and when it wasn't.
Mary Taylor, twenty-three, modest, sweet, winning, and in character and
person
beautiful, was all in all to him. And he was very nearly all in all to
her. She was
wavering, his hopes were high. Her mother had been in
opposition from the first. But she was wavering, too; he could see it. She
was being touched by his warm interest in her two charity-proteges and by
his contributions toward their support. These were two forlorn and aged
sisters who lived in a log hut in a lonely place up a cross road four miles from
Mrs Taylor's farm. One of the sisters was crazy, and sometimes a little
violent, but not often.
At last the time seemed ripe for a final advance, and Brown gathered his
courage
together and resolved to make it. He would take along a contribution
of double the usual size, and win the mother over; with her opposition
annulled,
the rest of the conquest would be sure and prompt.
He took to the road in the middle of a placid Sunday afternoon in the soft
Missourian
summer, and he was equipped properly for his mission. He was
clothed all in white linen,
with a blue ribbon for a necktie, and he had on
dressy tight boots. His horse and buggy
were the finest that the livery stable
could furnish. The lap robe was of white linen,
it was new, and it had a
hand-worked border that could not be rivaled in that region for
beauty and
elaboration.
When he was four miles out on the lonely road and was walking his horse
over a wooden
bridge, his straw hat blew off and fell in the creek, and floated
down and lodged
against a bar. He did not quite know what to do. He
must have the hat, that was
manifest; but how was he to get it?
Then he had an idea. The roads were empty, nobody was stirring. Yes,
he would risk it.
He led the horse to the roadside and set it to cropping the
grass; then he undressed and
put his clothes in the buggy, petted the horse
a moment to secure its compassion and
its loyalty, then hurried to the stream.
He swam out and soon had the hat.
When he got to the top of the bank the
horse was gone!
THE CLIMAX.
His legs almost gave way under him.
The horse was walking leisurely along
the
road. Brown trotted after it, saying,
'Whoa, whoa, there's a
good fellow;"
but whenever he got near enough
to chance
a jump for the buggy, the horse
quickened its pace a little and defeated
him. And
so this went on, the naked
man perishing with anxiety, and expecting
every moment to see people come in
sight. He tagged on and on, imploring
the
horse, beseeching the horse, till he
had left a mile behind him, and was closing
up on the Taylor premises; then at
last he was successful, and got into the
buggy. He flung on his shirt, his necktie,
and his coat;
then reached for—but he was too late; he sat suddenly
down and pulled up the
lap-robe, for he saw some one coming out of the
gate—a woman, he thought. He wheeled the horse to the left, and struck
briskly up the cross-road. It was perfectly straight, and exposed on both
sides; but there were woods and a sharp turn three miles ahead, and he was
very grateful when he got there. As he passed around the turn he slowed
down to a walk, and reached for his tr—too late again.
He had come upon Mrs. Enderby, Mrs. Glossop, Mrs. Taylor, and Mary.
They were on foot,
and seemed tired and excited. They came at once to the
buggy and shook hands, and all
spoke at once, and said eagerly and earnestly,
how glad they were that he was come, and
how fortunate it was. And Mrs.
Enderby said, impressively:
"It looks like an accident, his coming at such a time; but let no one
profane
it with such a name; he was sent—sent from on high."
They were all moved, and Mrs. Glossop said in an awed voice:
"Sarah Enderby, you never said a truer word in your life. This is no accident,
it is a special Providence. He was sent. He is
an angel—an angel
as truly as ever angel was—an angel of
deliverance. I say angel, Sarah Enderby,
and will have no other word. Don't let any one ever say to me again,
that there's
no such thing as special Providences; for if this isn't one, let
them account for it
that can."
"I know it's so," said Mrs. Taylor, fervently. "John Brown, I could
worship you; I could go down on my knees to you. Didn't something tell
you?—didn't you feel that you were sent? I could kiss the
hem of your lap-robe."
He was not able to speak; he was helpless with shame and fright. Mrs.
Taylor went on:
"Why, just look at it all around, Julia Glossop. Any person can see
the hand of Providence in it. Here at noon what do we see? We see the
smoke
rising. I speak up and say, 'That's the Old People's cabin afire.'
Didn't I, Julia
Glossop?"
"The very words you said, Nancy Taylor. I was as close to you as I am
now, and I heard
them. You may have said hut instead of cabin, but in
substance it's the same. And you
were looking pale, too."
"Pale? I was that pale that if—why, you just compare it with this lap-robe.
Then the next thing I said was, 'Mary Taylor, tell the
hired man to rig up
the team—we'll go to the rescue.' And she said, 'Mother,
don't you know
you told him he could drive to see his people, and stay over Sunday?' And
it was just so. I declare for it, I had forgotten it. 'Then,' said I, 'we'll go
afoot.' And go we did. And found Sarah Enderby on the road."
"And we all went together," said Mrs. Enderby. "And found the cabin
set fire to and
burnt down by the crazy one, and the poor old things so old and
feeble that they
couldn't go afoot. And we got them to a shady place and
made them as comfortable as we
could, and began to wonder which way
to turn to find some way to get them conveyed to
Nancy Taylor's house.
And I spoke up and said—now what did I say? Didn't I
say, 'Providence
will provide'?"
"Why sure as you live, so you did! I had forgotten it."
"So had I," said Mrs. Glossop and Mrs. Taylor; "but you certainly said
it. Now wasn't that remarkable?"
"Yes, I said it. And then we went to Mr. Moseley's, two miles, and all
of them were
gone to the camp meeting over on Stony Fork; and then we
came all the way back, two
miles, and then here, another mile—and Providence
has provided. You see it yourselves."
They gazed at each other awe-struck, and lifted their hands and said in
unison:
"It's per-fectly wonderful."
"And then," said Mrs. Glossop, "What do you think we had better do—
let Mr.
Brown drive the Old People to Nancy Taylor's one at a time, or put
both of them in the
buggy, and him lead the horse?"
Brown gasped.
"Now, then, that's a question," said Mrs. Enderby. "You see, we are
all tired out, and
any way we fix it it's going to be difficult. For if Mr.
Brown takes both of them, at
least one of us must go back to help him, for
he can't load them into the buggy by
himself, and they so helpless."
"That is so," said Mrs. Taylor. "It doesn't look—oh, how would this
do?—one of us drive there with Mr. Brown, and the rest of
you go along to
my house and get things ready. I'll go with him. He and I together can
lift one of the Old People into the buggy; then drive her to my house and—
"But who will take care of the other one?" said Mrs. Enderby. "We
musn't leave her
there in the woods alone, you know—especially the crazy
one. There and back
is eight miles, you see."
They had all been sitting on the grass beside the buggy for a while, now,
trying to
rest their weary bodies. They fell silent a moment or two, and
struggled in thought over
the baffling situation; then Mrs. Enderby brightened
and said:
"I think I've got the idea, now. You see, we can't walk any more.
Think what we've done: four miles there, two to Moseley's, is six, then back
to
here—nine miles since noon, and not a bite to eat; I declare I don't see
how
we've done it; and as for me, I am just famishing. Now, somebody's
got to go back, to
help Mr. Brown—there's no getting around that; but
whoever goes has got to
ride, not walk. So my idea is this: one of us to ride
back with Mr. Brown, then ride to
Nancy Taylor's house with one of the Old
People, leaving Mr. Brown to keep the other old
one company, you all to go
now to Nancy's and rest and wait; then one of you drive back
and get the
other one and drive her to Nancy's, and Mr. Brown
walk."
"Splendid!" they all cried. "Oh, that will do—that will answer perfectly."
And they all said that Mrs. Enderby had the best
head for planning,
in the company; and they said that they wondered that they hadn't
thought
of this simple plan themselves. They hadn't meant to take back the compliment,
good simple souls, and didn't know they had done
it. After a consultation
it was decided that Mrs. Enderby should drive back with Brown, she
being entitled
to the distinction because she had invented the plan. Everything
now being satisfactorily arranged and settled, the ladies rose, relieved
and
happy, and brushed down their gowns, and three of them started homeward;
Mrs. Enderby set her foot on the buggy-step and was about to climb
in, when Brown found a remnant of his voice and gasped out—
"Please Mrs. Enderby, call them back—I am very weak; I can't walk,
I can't,
indeed."
"Why, dear Mr. Brown! You do look pale; I am ashamed of myself
that I didn't notice it sooner. Come back—all of you! Mr. Brown is not
well.
Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Brown?—I'm real sorry.
Are you in
pain?"
"No, madam, only weak; I am not sick, but only just weak—lately;
not long,
but just lately."
The others came back, and poured out their sympathies and commiserations,
and were full of self-reproaches for not having noticed how pale
he was.
And they at once struck out a new plan, and soon agreed that it was by far
the best of all. They would all go to Nancy Taylor's house and see to
Brown's needs
first. He could lie on the sofa in the parlor, and while Mrs.
Taylor and Mary took care
of him the other two ladies would take the buggy
and go and get one of the Old People,
and leave one of themselves with the
other one, and—
By this time, without any solicitation, they were at the horse's head and
were
beginning to turn him around. The danger was imminent, but Brown
found his voice again
and saved himself. He said—
"But ladies, you are overlooking something which makes the plan impracticable.
You see, if you bring one of them home,
and one remains
behind with the other, there will be three persons there when one of you
comes back for that other, for some one must drive the buggy back, and three
can't come home in it."
They all exclaimed, "Why, sure-ly, that is so!" and they were all perplexed
again.
"Dear, dear, what can we do?" said Mrs. Glossop; "it is the most
mixed-up thing that ever was. The fox and the goose and the corn and
things—oh, dear, they are nothing to it."
They sat wearily down once more, to further torture their tormented heads
for a plan
that would work. Presently Mary offered a plan; it was her first
effort. She said:
"I am young and strong, and am refreshed, now. Take Mr. Brown to
our house, and give
him help—you see how plainly he needs it. I will go
back and take care of the
Old People; I can be there in twenty minutes.
You can go on and do what you first
started to do—wait on the main road at
our house until somebody comes along
with a wagon; then send and bring
away the three of us. Yoů won't have to
wait long; the farmers will soon
be coming back from town, now. I will keep old Polly
patient and cheered
up—the crazy one doesn't need it."
This plan was discussed and accepted; it seemed the best that could be
done, in the
circumstances, and the Old People must be getting discouraged
by this time.
Brown felt relieved, and was deeply thankful. Let him once get to the
main road and he
would find a way to escape.
Then Mrs. Taylor said:
"The evening chill will be coming on, pretty soon, and those poor old
burnt-out things will need some kind of covering. Take the lap-robe with you,
dear."
"Very well, Mother, I will".
She stepped to the buggy and put out her hand to take it—
That was the end of the tale. The passenger who told it said that when
he read the
story twenty-five years ago in a train he was interrupted at that
point—the
train jumped off a bridge.
At first we thought we could finish the story quite easily, and we set to
work with
confidence; but it soon began to appear that it was not a simple
thing, but difficult
and baffling. This was on account
of Brown's character—great generosity and
kindliness, but complicated
with unusual shyness
and diffidence, particularly in the presence of ladies.
There
was his love for Mary, in a hopeful state but
not yet secure—just in a
condition, indeed,
where its affair must be handled with great
tact, and no
mistakes made, no offense
given. And there was the mother—
wavering,
half willing—by adroit and
flawless diplomacy to be won over,
now, or
perhaps never at all. Also,
there were the helpless Old People
yonder in the woods
waiting—their
fate and Brown's happiness to be determined
by what Brown should do
within the next two seconds. Mary
was reaching for
the lap-robe; Brown
must decide—there was no time to
be lost.
"WE WORKED UNTIL THREE."
Of course none but a happy ending
of the story would be accepted by
the jury; the finish must find Brown in high
credit with the ladies, his
behavior without blemish, his modesty unwounded, his
character for self-sacrifice
maintained, the Old People rescued through him, their benefactor,
all the party
proud of him, happy in him, his praises on all their tongues.
We tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent and irreconcilable
difficulties. We saw that Brown's shyness would not allow him to give up
the lap-robe.
This would offend Mary and her mother; and it would surprise
the other ladies, partly
because this stinginess toward the suffering Old People
would be out of character with
Brown, and partly because he was a special
Providence and could not properly act so. If
asked to explain his conduct,
his shyness would not allow him to tell the truth, and
lack of invention and
practice would find him incapable of contriving a lie that would
wash. We
worked at the troublesome problem until three in the morning.
Meantime Mary was still reaching for the lap-robe. We gave it up, and
decided to let
her continue to reach. It is the reader's privilege to determine
for himself how the
thing came out.
CHAPTER III.
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
—Pudd' ahead Wilson's New Calendar.
the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing
up
out of the wastes of the Pacific and knew that
that spectral promontory was Diamond
Head, a piece
of this world which I had not seen before for twenty-nine
years. So
we were nearing Honolulu, the capital city of the
Sandwich Islands—those
islands which to me were Paradise;
a Paradise which I had been longing all those years
to see
again. Not any other thing in the world could have stirred
me as the sight
of that great rock did.
In the night we anchored a mile from shore. Through
my port I could see the twinkling
lights of Honolulu and the
dark bulk of the mountain-range that stretched away right
and left. I could not make out the beautiful Nuuana valley,
but I knew where it
lay, and remembered how it used to look
in the old times. We used to ride up it on
horseback in those
days—we young people—and branch off and gather
bones in
a sandy region where one of the first Kamehameha's battles
was fought. He
was a remarkable man, for a king; and he
was also a remarkable man for a savage. He was
a mere
kinglet and of little or no consequence at the time of Captain
Cook's
arrival in 1788; but about four years afterward he
conceived the idea of enlarging his
sphere of influence. That
is a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor—for
your neighbor's benefit; and the great theater of its
benevolences in Africa.
Kamehameha went to war, and in the
FACSIMILE PAGE FROM THE AUTHOR'S NOTE BOOK.
From note-book The man that invented the cuckoo
As news, this is a little old,
stale, but
As news, this is a little old, but
As news this is a little old, for it
The man that invented the cuckoo
Give it up. Am sorry
Occur
It is more diffi trouble to
construct
clock is no
more.dead.
It is old news but
good.
some news is better old than not at all.
better late than never.
happened 64 years ago, but it
is not always the never at news that is the
most interesting, best.
clock is no more. It is old news,
but there is, nothing else the
matter with it.
he died.
make a maxim than it is to
do right.
course of ten years he whipped out all the other kings and
made himself master of
every one of the nine or ten islands
that form the group. But he did more than that. He
bought
ships, freighted them with sandal wood and other native products,
and sent them as far as South America and China; he
sold to his
savages the foreign stuffs and tools and utensils
which came back in these ships, and
started the march of
civilization. It is doubtful if the match to this extraordinary
thing is to be found in the history of any other savage.
Savages are eager to
learn from the white man any new way
to kill each other, but it is not their habit to
seize with avidity
and apply with energy the larger and nobler ideas which he
offers them. The details of Kamehameha's history show that
he was always hospitably
ready to examine the white man's
ideas, and that he exercised a tidy discrimination in
making
his selections from the samples placed on view.
A shrewder discrimination than was exhibited by his son
and successor, Liholiho, I
think. Liholiho could have qualified
as a reformer, perhaps, but as a king he was a
mistake. A
mistake because he tried to be both king and
reformer. This
is mixing fire and gunpowder together. A king has no proper
business with reforming. His best policy is to keep things as
they are; and if he can't
do that, he ought to try to make
them worse than they are. This is not guesswork; I
have
thought over this matter a good deal, so that if I should ever
have a chance
to become a king I would know how to conduct
the business in the best way.
When Liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed
of an equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a
wiser king would have known
how to husband, and judiciously
employ, and make profitable. The entire country was
under
the one scepter, and his was that scepter. There was an
Established Church,
and he was the head of it. There was a
Standing Army, and he was the head of that; an Army of
114 privates under command of 27 Generals and a Field Marshal.
There was a proud and ancient Hereditary Nobility.
There was still one other asset. This was the tabu—an agent
endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an agent
not found among the properties of any European monarch, a
tool of inestimable value in the business. Liholiho was headmaster
of the tabu. The tabu was the most ingenious and
effective of all the inventions that has ever been devised for
keeping a people's privileges satisfactorily restricted.
It required the sexes to live in separate houses. It did not
allow people to eat in
either house; they must eat in another
place. It did not allow a man's woman-folk to
enter his
house. It did not allow the sexes to eat together; the men
must eat
first, and the women must wait on them. Then the
women could eat what was
left—if anything was left—and
wait on themselves. I mean, if
anything of a coarse or unpalatable
sort was left, the women could have it. But not the
good things, the fine things,
the choice things, such as pork,
poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the choicer varieties of
fish, and
so on. By the tabu, all these were sacred to the men; the
women spent
their lives longing for them and wondering what
they might taste like; and they died
without finding out.
These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. It
was easy to remember them;
and useful. For the penalty for
infringing any rule in the whole list was death. Those women
easily learned to put up with shark and taro and
dog for a diet
when the other things were so expensive.
It was death for any one to walk upon tabu'd ground; or
defile a tabu'd thing with
his touch; or fail in due servility to
a chief; or step upon the king's shadow. The
nobles and the
King and the priests were always suspending little rags here
and
there and yonder, to give notice to the people that the
decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near.
The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in
those days.
ROYAL EQUIPMENTS.
Thus advantageously
was the new king situated.
Will it be believed that the
first thing he did was to
destroy his Established
Church, root and branch?
He did indeed do that. To
state the case figuratively,
he was a prosperous
sailor
who burnt his ship and took
to a raft. This Church was
a horrid
thing. It heavily
oppressed the people; it
kept them always trembling
in
the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them
in sacrifice before its
grotesque idols of wood and stone; it
cowed them, it terrorized them, it made them
slaves to its
priests, and through the priests to the king. It was the best
friend a king could have, and the most dependable. To a
professional reformer who
should annihilate so frightful and
so devastating a power as this Church, reverence and
praise
would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly
be due
nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow;
sorrow for his unfitness for his
position.
He destroyed his Established Church, and his kingdom is a
republic to-day, in
consequence of that act.
When he destroyed the Church and burned the idols he did
a mighty thing for
civilization and for his people's weal—but
it was not "business." It was
unkingly, it was inartistic. It
made trouble for his line. The American missionaries
arrived
while the burned idols were still smoking. They found the
nation without a religion, and they repaired the defect. They
offered their own religion and it was gladly received. But it
was no support to arbitrary kingship, and so the kingly power
began to weaken from that day. Forty-seven years later,
when I was in the islands, Kamehameha V. was trying to
repair Liholiho's blunder, and not succeeding. He had set up
an Established Church and made himself the head of it. But
it was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble, an empty
show. It had no power, no value for a king. It could not
harry or burn or slay, it in no way resembled the admirable
machine which Liholiho destroyed. It was an Established
Church without an Establishment; all the people were Dissenters.
Long before that, the kingship had itself become but a
name, a show. At an early day
the missionaries had turned it
into something very much like a republic; and here
lately the
business whites have turned it into something exactly like it.
In Captain Cook's time (1778), the native population of the
islands
was estimated at 400,000; in 1836 at something short of
200,000, in 1866 at 50,000; it
is to-day, per census, 25,000. All
intelligent people praise Kamehameha I. and Liholiho
for conferring
upon their people the great boon of civilization. I
would do it myself, but my
intelligence is out of repair, now,
from over-work.
When I was in the islands nearly a generation ago, I was
acquainted with a young
American couple who had among
their belongings an attractive little son of the age of
seven—
attractive but not practicably companionable with me, because
he knew no English. He had played from his birth with the
little Kanakas on his
father's plantation, and had preferred
their language and would learn no other. The
family removed
to America a month after I arrived in the islands, and straight.
SOMETHING TOUCHED HIS SHOULDER.
way the boy began to lose his Kanaka and pick up English.
By the time he was twelve he hadn't a word of Kanaka left;
the language had wholly departed from his tongue and from his
comprehension. Nine years later, when he was twenty-one, I
came upon the family in one of the lake towns of New York,
and the mother told me about an adventure which her son had
been having. By trade he was now a professional diver. A
passenger boat had been caught in a storm on the lake, and had
gone down, carrying her people with her. A few days later
the young diver descended, with his armor on, and entered the
berth-saloon of the boat, and stood at the foot of the companionway,
with his hand on the rail, peering through the dim
water. Presently something touched him on the shoulder, and
he turned and found a dead man swaying and bobbing about
him and seemingly inspecting him inquiringly. He was paralyzed
with fright. His entry had disturbed the water, and
now he discerned a number of dim corpses making for him and
wagging their heads and swaying their bodies like sleepy people
trying to dance. His senses forsook him, and in that condition
he was drawn to the surface. He was put to bed at
home, and was soon very ill. During some days he had seasons
of delirium which lasted several hours at a time; and
while they lasted he talked Kanaka incessantly and glibly; and
Kanaka only. He was still very ill, and he talked to me in
that tongue; but I did not understand it, of course. The
doctor-books tell us that cases like this are not uncommon.
Then the doctors ought to study the cases and find out how
to multiply them. Many languages and things get mislaid in
a person's head, and stay mislaid for lack of this remedy.
Many memories of my former visit to the islands came up
in my mind while we lay at
anchor in front of Honolulu that
night. And
pictures—pictures—pictures—an enchanting
procession of
them! I was impatient for the morning to come
When it came it brought disappointment, of course.
Cholera had broken out in the
town, and we were not allowed
to have any communication with the shore. Thus suddenly
did my dream of twenty-nine years go to ruin. Messages came
from friends, but the
friends themselves I was not to have any
sight of. My lecture-hall was ready, but I was
not to see that,
either.
Several of our passengers belonged in Honolulu, and these
were sent ashore; but
nobody could go ashore and return.
There were people on shore who were booked to go
with us to
Australia, but we could not receive them; to do it would cost
us a
quarantine-term in Sydney. They could have escaped the
day before, by ship to San
Francisco; but the bars had been
put up, now, and they might have to wait weeks before
any
ship could venture to give them a passage any whither. And
there were
hardships for others. An elderly lady and her son,
recreation-seekers from
Massachusetts, had wandered westward,
further and further from home, always intending
to take the
return track, but always concluding to go still a little further;
and
now here they were at anchor before Honolulu—positively
their last
westward-bound indulgence—they had made up
their minds to
that—but where is the use in making up your
mind in this world? It is
usually a waste of time to do it.
These two would have to stay with us as far as
Australia.
Then they could go on around the world, or go back the way
they had
come; the distance and the accommodations and outlay
of time would be just the same, whichever of the two
routes they might elect to
take. Think of it: a projected excursion
of five hundred miles gradually enlarged, without any
elaborate degree of
intention, to a possible twenty-four thousand.
However,
they were used to extentions by this time, and
did not mind this new one much.
And we had with us a lawyer from Victoria, who had been
sent out by the Government on an international matter, and he
had brought his wife with him and left the children at home
with the servants—and now what was to be done? Go ashore
amongst the cholera and take the risks? Most certainly not.
They decided to go on, to the Fiji islands, wait there a fortnight
for the next ship, and then sail for home. They couldn't
foresee that they wouldn't see a homeward-bound ship again
for six weeks, and that no word could come to them from the
children, and no word go from them to the children in all that
time. It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can
do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable
that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same.
There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of
values.
There was nothing for us to do but sit about the decks in
the shade of the awnings
and look at the distant shore. We
lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was
green—
green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long white
ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The
town was buried under
a mat of foliage that looked like a
cushion of moss. The silky mountains were clothed
in soft,
rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were
veiled in
slanting mists. I recognized it all. It was just as I
had seen it long before, with
nothing of its beauty lost, nothing
of its charm wanting.
A change had come, but that was political, and not visible
from the ship. The
monarchy of my day was gone, and a
republic was sitting in its seat. It was not a
material change.
The old imitation pomps, the fuss and feathers, have departed,
and the royal trademark—that is about all that one could
miss, I suppose.
That imitation monarchy was grotesque
enough, in my time; if it had held on another
thirty years it
would have been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race.
We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the
sea was marked off in
bands of sharply-contrasted colors:
great stretches of dark blue, others of purple,
others of polished
bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty
browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the
rounded velvety backs of
certain of them made one want to
stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat. The
long,
sloping promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned
dim and
leaden and spectral, then became suffused with pink
—dissolved itself in a
pink dream, so to speak, it seemed so
airy and unreal. Presently the cloud-rack was
flooded with
fiery splendors, and these were copied on the surface of the
sea,
and it made one drunk with delight to look upon it.
From talks with certain of our passengers whose home was
Honolulu, and from a sketch
by Mrs. Mary H. Krout, I was
able to perceive what the Honolulu of to-day is, as
compared
with the Honolulu of my time. In my time it was a beautiful
little town,
made up of snow-white wooden cottages deliciously
smothered in tropical vines and
flowers and trees and shrubs;
and its coral roads and streets were hard and smooth, and
as
white as the houses. The outside aspects of the place suggested
the presence of a modest and comfortable prosperity—
a general
prosperity—perhaps one might strengthen the term
and say universal. There
were no fine houses, no fine furniture.
There were no
decorations. Tallow candles furnished
the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp
furnished it for
the parlor. Native matting served as carpeting. In the parlor
one would find two or three lithographs on the walls—portraits
as a rule:
Kamehameha IV., Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and
may be an engraving or two: Rebecca at
the Well, Moses
smiting the rock, Joseph's servants finding the cup in Benjamin's
sack. There would be a center table, with books of a
tranquil sort on it: The
whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints'
Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, bound
copies of The Missionary Herald and of Father Damon's
Seaman's Friend. A melodeon; a music stand, with Willie,
We have Missed You, Star of the Evening, Roll on Silver
Moon, Are We Most There, I Would not Live Alway, and
other songs of love and sentiment, together with an assortment
of hymns. A what-not with semi-globular glass paperweights,
enclosing miniature pictures of ships, New England
rural snowstorms, and the like; sea-shells with Bible texts
carved on them in cameo style; native curios; whale's tooth
with full-rigged ship carved on it. There was nothing reminiscent
of foreign parts, for nobody had been abroad. Trips
were made to San Francisco, but that could not be called going
abroad. Comprehensively speaking, nobody traveled.
But Honolulu has grown wealthy since then, and of course
wealth has introduced
changes; some of the old simplicities
have disappeared. Here is a modern house, as
pictured by
Mrs. Krout:
"Almost every house is surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens enclosed
by walls of volcanic stone or by thick hedges of the brilliant hibiscus.
"The houses are most tastefully and comfortably furnished; the floors
are either of
hard wood covered with rugs or with fine Indian matting, while
there is a preference,
as in most warm countries, for rattan or bamboo furniture;
there are the usual accessories of bric-a-brac, pictures, books, and
curios from
all parts of the world, for these island dwellers are indefatigable
travelers.
"Nearly every house has what is called a lanai. It is a large
apartment,
roofed, floored, open on three sides, with a door or a draped archway
opening
into the drawing-room. Frequently the roof is formed by the thick interlacing
boughs of the hou tree, impervious to the sun and even to the
rain, except
in violent storms. Vines are trained about the sides—the stephanotis or
some one of the countless fragrant and blossoming trailers which abound in
the
islands. There are also curtains of matting that may be drawn to exclude
the sun or rain. The floor is bare for coolness, or partially covered
with rugs,
and the lanai is prettily furnished with comfortable chairs, sofas,
and tables loaded with flowers, or wonderful ferns in pots.
"The lanai is the favorite reception room, and here at any social
function
the musical program is given and cakes and ices are served; here morning
callers are received, or gay riding parties, the ladies in pretty divided skirts,
worn for convenience in riding astride,—the universal mode adopted by
Europeans and Americans, as well as by the natives. "The comfort and luxury of such an apartment, especially at a seashore
villa, can hardly be imagined. The soft breezes sweep across it, heavy with
the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and through the swaying boughs of
palm and mimosa there are glimpses of rugged mountains, their summits
veiled in clouds, of purple sea with the white surf beating eternally against
the reefs,—whiter still in the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of
the tropics."
There: rugs, ices, pictures, lanais, worldly books, sinful
bric-a-brac fetched from
everywhere. And the ladies riding
astride. These are changes, indeed. In my time the
native
women rode astride, but the white ones lacked the courage to
adopt their
wise custom. In my time ice was seldom seen in
Honolulu. It sometimes came in sailing
vessels from New
England as ballast; and then, if there happened to be a man-of-war
in port and balls and suppers raging by consequence,
the ballast was worth six
hundred dollars a ton, as is evidenced
by reputable tradition. But the ice-machine has
traveled all
over the world, now, and brought ice within everybody's
reach. In
Lapland and Spitzbergen no one uses native ice in
our day, except the bears and the
walruses.
The bicycle is not mentioned. It was not necessary. We
know that it is there, without
inquiring. It is everywhere.
But for it, people could never have had summer homes on
the
summit of Mont Blanc; before its day, property up there had
but a nominal
value. The ladies of the Hawaiian capital
learned too late the right way to occupy a
horse—too late to
get much benefit from it. The riding-horse is retiring
from
business everywhere in the world. In Honolulu a few years
from now he will
be only a tradition.
We all know about Father Damien, the French priest
who voluntarily forsook the world
and went to the leper
island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful
exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death
to come and release them from their troubles; and we know
that the thing which he knew beforehand would happen, did
happen: that he became a leper himself, and died of that
horrible disease. There was still another case of self-sacrifice,
it appears. I asked after "Billy" Ragsdale, interpreter to the
Parliament in my time—a half-white. He was a brilliant
young fellow, and very popular. As an interpreter he would
have been hard to match anywhere. He used to stand up in
the Parliament and turn the English speeches into Hawaiian
and the Hawaiian speeches into English with a readiness
and a volubility that were astonishing. I asked after him,
and was told that his prosperous career was cut short in a
sudden and unexpected way, just as he was about to marry
a beautiful half-caste girl. He discovered, by some nearly
invisible sign about his skin, that the poison of leprosy was in
him. The secret was his own, and might be kept concealed
for years; but he would not be treacherous to the girl that
loved him; he would not marry her to a doom like his. And
so he put his affairs in order, and went around to all his friends
and bade them good-bye, and sailed in the leper ship to
Molokai. There he died the loathsome and lingering death
that all lepers die.
In this place let me insert a paragraph or two from "The
Paradise of the Pacific"
(Rev. H. H. Gowen):
"Poor lepers! It is easy for those who have no relatives or friends
among them to
enforce the decree of segregation to the letter, but who can
write of the terrible,
the heart-breaking scenes which that enforcement has
brought about?
"A man upon Hawaii was suddenly taken away after a summary arrest,
leaving behind
him a helpless wife about to give birth to a babe. The
devoted wife with great pain
and risk came the whole journey to Honolulu,
and pleaded until the authorities were
unable to resist her entreaty that she
might go and live like a leper with her leper
husband. "A woman in the prime of life and activity is condemned as an incipient
leper, suddenly removed from her home, and her husband returns to find his
two
helpless babes moaning for their lost mother.
"Imagine it! The case of the babies is hard, but its bitterness is a trifle
—less than a trifle—less than nothing—compared to what the mother must
suffer; and suffer minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, month by
month, year by year, without respite, relief, or any abatement of her pain till
she dies. "One woman, Luka Kaaukau, has been living with her leper husband in
the settlement for twelve years. The man has scarcely a joint left, his limbs
are only distorted ulcerated stumps, for four years his wife has put every
particle of food into his mouth. He wanted his wife to abandon his wretched
carcass long ago, as she herself was sound and well, but Luka said that she
was content to remain and wait on the man she loved till the spirit should be
freed from its burden. "I myself have known hard cases enough:—of a girl, apparently in full
health, decorating the church with me at Easter, who before Christmas is
taken away as a confirmed leper; of a mother hiding her child in the
mountains for years so that not even her dearest friends knew that she had a
child alive, that he might not be taken away; of a respectable white man
taken away from his wife and family, and compelled to become a dweller in
the Leper Settlement, where he is counted dead, even by the insurance
companies."
And one great pity of it all is, that these poor sufferers
are innocent. The leprosy
does not come of sins which they
committed, but of sins committed by their ancestors,
who
escaped the curse of leprosy!
Mr. Gowan has made record of a certain very striking
circumstance. Would you expect
to find in that awful Leper
Settlement a custom worthy to be transplanted to your own
country? They have one such, and it is inexpressibly touching
and beautiful. When
death sets open the prison-door of life
there, the band salutes the freed soul with a
burst of glad
music!
CHAPTER IV.
A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
from Honolulu. From diary:
Sept. 2. Flocks of flying fish—slim, shapely, graceful,
and intensely white. With the sun on them they
look like a flight of silver fruit-knives. They are able to fly a
hundred yards.
Sept. 3. In 9° 50' north latitude, at breakfast. Approaching
the equator on a long slant. Those of us who have never
seen the equator are a
good deal excited. I think I would
rather see it than any other thing in the world. We
entered
the "doldrums" last night—variable winds, bursts of rain,
intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and
drunken motion to the
ship—a condition of things findable
in other regions sometimes, but present
in the doldrums
always. The globe-girdling belt called the doldrums is 20 degrees
wide, and the thread called the equator lies along the
middle of it.
Sept. 4. Total eclipse of the moon last night. At 7.30 it
began
to go off. At total—or about that—it was like a rich
rosy cloud
with a tumbled surface framed in the circle and
projecting from it—a bulge of
strawberry-ice, so to speak. At
half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded acorn in its
cup.
Sept. 5. Closing in on the equator this noon. A sailor explained
to a young girl that the ship's speed is poor because we
are climbing up the bulge
toward the center of the globe; but
that when we should once get over, at the equator,
and start
down-hill, we should fly. When she asked him the other day
what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard, the open
area in the front end of the ship. That man has a good deal of
learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.
WATCHING FOR THE BLUE RIBBON.
Afternoon. Crossed the equator. In the distance it looked
like
a blue ribbon stretched across the ocean. Several passengers
kodak'd it. We had no fool
ceremonies,
no fantastics, no horseplay.
All that sort of thing
has gone out. In old times a
sailor, dressed as Neptune, used
to come in over the bows, with
his suite, and
lather up and
shave everybody who was crossing
the equator for the first
time, and then cleanse these
unfortunates by
swinging them
from the yard-arm and ducking them three times in the sea.
This was
considered funny. Nobody knows why. No, that
is not true. We do know why. Such a thing
could never be
funny on land; no part of the old-time grotesque performances
gotten up on shipboard to celebrate the passage of the line
could ever be funny on
shore—they would seem dreary and
witless to shore people. But the shore
people would change
their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage. On such a
voyage, with its eternal monotonies, people's intellects deteriorate;
the owners of the intellects soon reach a point where
they
almost seem to prefer childish things to things of a maturer
degree. One is often surprised at the juvenilities which
grown people indulge in
at sea, and the interest they take in
them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of
them.
This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes
inert, dull,
blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual
THE BLUE RIBBON.
"HORSE BILLIARDS."
DIAGRAM.
things; nothing but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but
wild and foolish grotesqueries can entertain it. On short voyages
it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn't time to slump
down to this sorrowful level.
The short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise
out of
"horse-billiards"—shovel-board. It is a good game.
We play it in this ship. A
quartermaster chalks off a diagram
like this—on the deck.
The player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a
quarter-moon of wood fastened
to the end of it. With this he
shoves wooden disks the size of a saucer—he
gives the disk a
vigorous shove and sends it fifteen or twenty feet along the
deck
and lands it in one of the squares if he can. If it stays
there till the inning is
played out, it will count as many points
in the game as the figure in the square it has
stopped in represents.
The adversary plays to knock that
disk out and leave
his own in its place—particularly if it rests upon the 9
or 10
or some other of the high numbers; but if it rests in the "10off"
he backs it up—lands his disk behind it a foot or two, to
make it difficult for its owner to knock it out of that damaging
place and improve his record. When the inning is played
out it may be found that
each adversary has placed his four
disks where they count; it may be found that some of
them
are touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it
will be found
that there has been a general wreckage, and
that not a disk has been left within the
diagram. Anyway,
the result is recorded, whatever it is, and the game goes on.
The
game is 100 points, and it takes from twenty minutes to
forty to play it, according to
luck and the condition of the sea.
It is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators
furnish
abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter
for the other kind. It is a game of skill, but at the same
time the uneasy motion
of the ship is constantly interfering
with skill; this makes it a chancy game, and the element of
luck comes largely in.
We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who
should be "Champion of the
Pacific"; they included among
the participants nearly all the passengers, of both sexes,
and
the officers of the ship, and they afforded many days of stupendous
interest and excitement, and murderous exercise—for
horse-billiards is
a physically violent game.
The figures in the following record of some of the closing
games in the first
tournament will show, better than any
description, how very chancy the game is. The
losers here
represented had all been winners in the previous games of the
series,
some of them by fine majorities:
And so on; until but three couples of winners were left.
Then I beat my man, young
Smith beat his man, and Thomas
beat his. This reduced the combatants to three. Smith and
I
took the deck, and I led off. At the close of the first inning I
was 10 worse
than nothing and Smith had scored 7. The luck
continued against me. When I was 57, Smith
was 97—
within 3 of out. The luck changed then. He picked up a
10-off
or so, and couldn't recover. I beat him.
The next game would end tournament No. 1.
Mr. Thomas and I were the contestants. He won the lead
and went to the
bat—so to speak. And there he stood, with
the crotch of his cue resting
against his disk while the ship
rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose again, sank
again. She
never seemed to rise to suit him exactly. She started up once
more; and
when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let
drive and landed his disk just within the
left-hand end of the
10. (Applause). The umpire proclaimed "a good 10," and
the game-keeper set it down. I played: my disk grazed the
edge of Mr. Thomas's disk, and went out of the diagram. (No
applause.)
Mr. Thomas played again—and landed his second disk
alongside of the first,
and almost touching its right-hand side.
"Good 10." (Great applause.)
I played, and missed both of them. (No applause.)
Mr. Thomas delivered his third shot and landed his disk
just at the right of the other
two. "Good 10." (Immense
applause.)
There they lay, side by side, the three in a row. It did
not seem possible that
anybody could miss them. Still I did
it. (Immense silence.)
Mr. Thomas played his last disk. It seems incredible, but
he actually landed that disk
alongside of the others, and just
to the right of them—a straight solid row
of 4 disks. (Tumultuous
and long-continued applause.)
Then I played my last disk. Again it did not seem possible
that anybody could miss
that row—a row which would have
been 14 inches long if the disks had been
clamped together;
whereas, with the spaces separating them they made a longer
row
than that. But I did it. It may be that I was getting
nervous.
I think it unlikely that that innings has ever had its
parallel in the history of
horse-billiards. To place the four
disks side by side in the 10 was an extraordinary
feat; indeed,
it was a kind of miracle. To miss them was another miracle.
It will
take a century to produce another man who can place
the four disks in the 10; and longer
than that to find a man
who can't knock them out. I was ashamed of my performance
at the time, but now that I reflect upon it I see that it was
rather fine and difficult.
Mr. Thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the
championship.
In a minor tournament I won the prize, which was a
Waterbury watch. I put it in my
trunk. In Pretoria, South
Africa, nine months afterward, my proper watch broke down
and I took the Waterbury out, wound it, set it by the great
clock on the
Parliament House (8.05), then went back to my
room and went to bed,
tired from a long railway journey.
The parliamentary clock had a peculiarity which I was
not
aware of at the time—a peculiarity which exists in no other
clock,
and would not exist in that one if it had been made
by a sane person; on the half-hour
it strikes the succeeding
hour, then strikes the hour again at the proper
time. I
lay reading and smoking awhile; then, when I could hold my
eyes open no
longer and was about to put out the light, the
great clock began to
boom, and I
counted—
ten. I reached for the Waterbury to see how it was getting
along. It was marking 9.30. It seemed rather poor speed for
a three-dollar watch, but I
supposed that the climate was
I BEAT HER BRAINS OUT.
affecting it. I shoved it half an hour ahead, and took to my
book and waited to see what would happen. At 10 the great
clock struck ten again. I looked—the Waterbury was marking
half-past 10. This was too much speed for the money, and
it troubled me. I pushed the hands back a half hour, and
waited once more; I had to, for I was vexed and restless
now, and my sleepiness was gone. By and by the great clock
struck 11. The Waterbury was marking 10.30. I pushed it
ahead half an hour, with some show of temper. By and by
the great clock struck 11 again. The Waterbury showed
up 11.30, now, and I beat her brains out against the bedstead.
I was sorry next day, when I found out.
To return to the ship.
The average human being is a perverse creature; and when
he isn't that, he is a
practical joker. The result to the other
person concerned is about the same: that is, he
is made to suffer.
The washing down of the decks begins at a
very early
hour in all ships; in but few ships are any measures taken to
protect
the passengers, either by waking or warning them, or
by sending a steward to close their
ports. And so the deck-washers
have their opportunity, and they use it. They send a
bucket of water slashing
along the side of the ship and into
the ports, drenching the passenger's clothes, and
often the passenger
himself. This good old custom prevailed in this ship,
and under unusually
favorable circumstances, for in the blazing
tropical regions a removable zinc thing like
a sugar-shovel projects
from the port to catch the wind and bring it in; this
thing catches the wash-water
and brings it in, too—and in
flooding abundance. Mrs. I., an invalid, had to
sleep on the
locker-sofa under her port, and every time she over-slept and
thus
failed to take care of herself, the deck-washers drowned
her out.
And the painters, what a good time they had! This ship
would be going into dock for a month in Sydney for repairs;
but no matter, painting was going on all the time somewhere
or other. The ladies' dresses were constantly getting ruined,
nevertheless protests and supplications went for nothing.
Sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a
ventilator or some other thing that didn't need painting,
would wake up by and by and find that the humorous painter
had been noiselessly daubing that thing and had splattered her
white gown all over with little greasy yellow spots.
The blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the
ship's officers, but with
custom. As far back as Noah's time
it became law that ships must be constantly painted
and fussed
at when at sea; custom grew out of the law, and at sea custom
knows no
death; this custom will continue until the sea goes
dry.
A DAY OFF.
Sept. 8.—Sunday. We are moving so nearly south that
we cross only about two meridians of longitude a day. This
morning we were in longitude
178 west from Greenwich, and
57 degrees west from San Francisco. To-morrow we shall be
close to the center of the globe—the 180th degree of west
longitude and 180th degree of east longitude.
And then we must drop out a day—lose a day out of our
lives, a day never to
be found again. We shall all die one day
earlier than from the beginning of time we were
foreordained
to die. We shall be a day behindhand all through eternity.
We shall
always be saying to the other angels, "Fine day today,"
and
they will be always retorting, "But it isn't to-day,
it's to-morrow." We shall be in a
state of confusion all the
time and shall never know what true happiness is.
Next Day. Sure enough, it has happened. Yesterday it
was
September 8, Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at
the head
of the companionway, it is September 10, Tuesday.
There is something uncanny about it. And uncomfortable.
In fact, nearly
unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable, when
one comes to consider it. While we were
crossing the 180th
meridian it was Sunday in the stern of the
ship where my
family were, and Tuesday in the bow where I was.
They
were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and
I was at the same
time eating the other half of it on the
10th—and I could notice how stale it
was, already. The
family were the same age that they were when I had left
them
five minutes before, but I was a day older now than
I was then. The day they were living
in stretched behind
them half way round the globe, across the Pacific Ocean
and
America and Europe; the day I was living in stretched
in front of me around the other
half to meet it. They were
stupendous days for bulk and stretch; apparently much larger
days than we had ever been in before. All previous days had
been but shrunk-up
little things by comparison. The difference
in temperature between the two days was very marked,
their day being hotter than
mine because it was closer to the
equator.
Along about the moment that we were crossing the Great
Meridian a child was born in
the steerage, and now there is
no way to tell which day it was born on. The nurse thinks
it was Sunday, the surgeon thinks it was Tuesday. The child
will never know its
own birthday. It will always be choosing
first one and then the other, and will never be
able to make
up its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty
in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business,
and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its
principles, and rot them
away, and make the poor thing
characterless, and its success in life impossible. Every
one
in the ship says so. And this is not all—in fact, not the
worst.
For there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship
who said as much as ten days ago,
that if the child was born
on his birthday he would give it ten thousand dollars to
start its little life with. His birthday was Monday, the 9th
of September.
If the ships all moved in the one direction—westward,
I mean—the
world would suffer a prodigious loss in the
matter of valuable time, through the dumping
overboard on
the Great Meridian of such multitudes of days by ships' crews
and
passengers. But fortunately the ships do not all sail
west, half of them sail east. So
there is no real loss. These
latter pick up all the discarded days and add them to the
world's stock again; and about as good as new, too; for of
course the salt water
preserves them.
CHAPTER V.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if
she had
laid an asteroid.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, Sept. 11. In this world we
often make
mistakes of judgment. We do not as a rule get out
of them sound and
whole, but sometimes we do. At
dinner yesterday evening—present, a mixture of
Scotch, English,
American, Canadian, and Australasian
folk—a discussion
broke out about the pronunciation of certain Scottish
words.
This was private ground, and the non-Scotch nationalities,
with one
exception, discreetly kept still. But I am not
discreet, and I took a hand. I didn't
know anything about
the subject, but I took a hand just to have something to do.
At that moment the word in dispute was the word three.
One Scotchman was claiming that the peasantry of Scotland
pronounced it three, his adversaries claimed that they didn't—
that
they pronounced it thraw. The solitary Scot was having
a sultry
time of it, so I thought I would enrich him with my
help. In my position I was
necessarily quite impartial, and was
equally as well and as ill equipped to fight on the
one side as on
the other. So I spoke up and said the peasantry pronounced
the word
three, not thraw. It was an error of judgment.
There was a moment of astonished and ominous silence, then
weather ensued. The
storm rose and spread in a surprising
way, and I was snowed under in a very few minutes.
It was
a bad defeat for me—a kind of Waterloo. It promised to
remain
so, and I wished I had had better sense than to enter
upon such a forlorn enterprise.
But just then I had a saving
thought—at least a thought that offered a chance. While the
storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then
spoke up and said:—
"Very well, don't say any more. I confess defeat. I
thought I knew, but I see my
mistake. I was deceived by one
of your Scotch poets."
"A Scotch poet! O come! Name him."
"Robert Burns."
It is wonderful the power of that name. These men looked
doubtful—but
paralyzed, all the same. They were quite
silent for a moment; then one of them
said—with the reverence
in his voice which is always present in a Scotchman's tone
when he utters the
name:
"Does Robbie Burns say—what does he say?"
"This is what he says:
'"There were nae bairns but only three—Ane at the breast, twa at the knee."'
It ended the discussion. There was no man there profane
enough, disloyal enough, to
say any word against a thing
which Robert Burns had settled. I shall always honor that
great name for the salvation it brought me in this time of my
sore need.
It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played
with confidence, stands a
good chance to deceive. There are
people who think that honesty is always the best
policy. This
is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is
worth
six of it.
We are moving steadily southward—getting further and
further down under the
projecting paunch of the globe. Yesterday
evening we saw the Big Dipper and the north star sink
below the horizon and
disappear from our world. No, not
"we," but they. They saw it—somebody saw
it—and told
me about it. But it is no matter, I was not caring for those
things, I am tired of them, any way. I think they are well
enough, but one doesn't want them always hanging around.
My interest was all in the Southern Cross. I had never seen
that. I had heard about it all my life, and it was but natural
that I should be burning to see it. No other constellation
makes so much talk. I had nothing against the Big Dipper—
and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a
citizen of our own sky, and the property of the United States—
but I did want it to move out of the way and give this
foreigner a chance. Judging by the size of the talk which the
Southern Cross had made, I supposed it would need a sky all
to itself.
But that was a mistake. We saw the Cross to-night, and it
is not large. Not large, and
not strikingly bright. But it was
low down toward the horizon, and it may improve when
it gets
up higher in the sky. It is ingeniously named, for it looks just
as a
cross would look if it looked like something else. But
that description does not
describe; it is too vague, too general,
too indefinite. It does after a fashion suggest
a cross—a cross
that is out of repair—or out of drawing; not
correctly shaped.
It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted
out of the straight line.
OUT OF REPAIR.
It consists of four large stars and
one little one. The little one is out
of
line and further damages the shape.
It should have been placed at the intersection
of the stem and the cross-bar.
If you do not draw an imaginary line from star to
star it does
not suggest a cross—nor anything in particular.
One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination—it
confuses everything. If you leave it out, then you
can make out of the four stars
a sort of cross—out of true; or
a sort of kite—out of true; or a
sort of coffin—out of true.
Constellations have always been troublesome things to
name. If you give one of them a
fanciful name, it will always
refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not
resembling
the thing it has been named
for. Ultimately, to satisfy
the
public, the fanciful name
has to be discarded for a common-sense
one, a manifestly
descriptive one. The Great
Bear remained the Great Bear
—and unrecognizable as such
—for thousands of years; and
people complained about it all
the time, and quite properly;
but as soon as
it became the
property of the United States,
Congress changed it to the
Big
Dipper, and now everybody
is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots. I
would not change the
Southern Cross to the Southern Coffin,
I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up
there in the
general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for
coffins
and crosses and dippers. In a little while, now—I
cannot tell exactly how
long it will be—the globe will belong
to the English-speaking race; and of
course the skies also.
Then the constellations will be re-organized, and polished up,
and re-named—the most of them "Victoria," I reckon, but
this one will
sail thereafter as the Southern Kite, or go out of
business. Several towns and things,
here and there, have been
named for Her Majesty already.
SOUTHERN CROSS.
In these past few days we are plowing through a mighty
Milky Way of islands. They are
so thick on the map that one
would hardly expect to find room between them for a canoe;
yet we seldom glimpse one. Once we saw the dim bulk of a
couple of them, far away, spectral and dreamy things; members
of the Horne—Alofa and Fortuna. On the larger one
are two rival native kings—and they have a time together.
They are Catholics; so are their people. The missionaries
there are French priests.
From the multitudinous islands in these regions the "recruits"
for the Queensland plantations were formerly drawn;
are still drawn from them, I
believe. Vessels fitted up like
old-time slavers came here and carried off the natives
to serve
as laborers in the great Australian province. In the beginning
it was
plain, simple manstealing, as per testimony of the missionaries.
This has been denied, but not disproven. Afterward
it was forbidden by law to "recruit" a native without
his consent, and
governmental agents were sent in all recruiting
vessels to see that the law was
obeyed—which they did,
according to the recruiting people; and which they
sometimes
didn't, according to the missionaries. A man could be lawfully
recruited
for a three-years term of service; he could volunteer
for another term if he so chose;
when his time was up he
could return to his island. And would also have the means to
do it; for the government required the employer to put money
in its hands for this
purpose before the recruit was delivered to
him.
Captain Wawn was a recruiting shipmaster during many
years. From his pleasant book one
gets the idea that the
recruiting business was quite popular with the islanders, as a
rule. And yet that did not make the business wholly dull and
uninteresting; for
one finds rather frequent little breaks in the
monotony of it—like this, for
instance:
"The afternoon of our arrival at Leper Island the schooner was lying
almost becalmed
under the lee of the lofty central portion of the island, about
three-quarters of a
mile from the shore. The boats were in sight at some distance.
The recruiter-boat had run into a small nook on the rocky coast, under
a high bank, above which stood a solitary hut backed by dense forest. The
government agent and mate in the second boat lay about 400 yards to the
westward. "Suddenly we heard the sound of firing, followed by yells from the
natives on shore, and then we saw the recruiter-boat push out with a seemingly
diminished crew. The mate's boat pulled quickly up, took her in tow,
and presently brought her alongside, all her own crew being more or less hurt.
It seems the natives had called them into the place on pretence of friendship.
A crowd gathered about the stern of the boat, and several fellows even got
into her. All of a sudden our men were attacked with clubs and tomahawks.
The recruiter escaped the first blows aimed at him, making play with his fists
until he had an opportunity to draw his revolver. 'Tom Sayers,' a Maré
man, received a tomahawk blow on the head which laid the scalp open but
did not penetrate his skull, fortunately. 'Bobby Towns,' another Maré boatman,
had both his thumbs cut in warding off blows, one of them being so
nearly severed from the hand that the doctors had to finish the operation.
Lihu, a Lifu boy, the recruiter's special attendant, was cut and pricked in
various places, but nowhere seriously. Jack, an unlucky Tanna recruit, who
had been engaged to act as boatman, received an arrow through his forearm,
the head of which—a piece of bone seven or eight inches long—was still
in the limb, protruding from both sides, when the boats returned. The recruiter
himself would have got off scot-free had not an arrow pinned one of
his fingers to the loom of the steering-oar just as they were getting off. The
fight had been short but sharp. The enemy lost two men, both shot dead."
The truth is, Captain Wawn furnishes such a crowd of
instances of fatal encounters
between natives and French and
English recruiting-crews (for the French are in
the business for
the plantations of New Caledonia), that one is almost persuaded
that recruiting is not thoroughly popular among the
islanders; else why this
bristling string of attacks and bloodcurdling
slaughter? The captain lays it all to "Exeter Hall
influence." But for the
meddling philanthropists, the native
fathers and mothers would be fond of seeing their
children
carted into exile and now and then the grave, instead of weeping
about it and trying to kill the kind recruiters.
CHAPTER VI.
He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits.
—Puddn'head Wilson's New Calendar.
Wawn is crystal-clear on one point: He
does not
approve of missionaries. They obstruct his
business. They make "Recruiting," as he calls
it
("Slave-Catching," as they call it in their frank
way) a trouble
when it ought to be just a picnic and a pleasure excursion.
The missionaries have their opinion about the manner in which
the Labor Traffic is
conducted, and about the recruiter's
evasions of the law of the Traffic, and about the
traffic itself:
and it is distinctly uncomplimentary to the Traffic and to
everything connected with it, including the law for its regulation.
Captain Wawn's book is of very recent date; I have by
me a
pamphlet of still later date—hot from the press, in fact
—by Rev.
Wm. Gray, a missionary; and the book and the
pamphlet taken together make exceedingly
interesting reading,
to my mind.
Interesting, and easy to understand—except in one detail,
which I will
mention presently. It is easy to understand why
the Queensland sugar planter should want
the Kanaka recruit:
he is cheap. Very cheap, in fact. These are the figures paid
by the planter: £20 to the recruiter for getting the Kanaka—
or
"catching" him, as the missionary phrase goes; £3 to the
Queensland
government for "superintending" the importation;
£5 deposited with the
Government for the Kanaka's passage
home when his three years are up, in case he shall
live that
long; about £25 to the Kanaka himself for three years' wages
and clothing; total payment for the use of a man three years,
£53; or, including diet, £60. Altogether, a hundred dollars a
year. One can understand why the recruiter is fond of the
business; the recruit costs him a few
cheap presents (given to the recruit's
relatives, not to the recruit himself),
and the re-cruit is worth £20
to the recruiter
when delivered in
Queensland. All
this is clear enough;
but the thing that
is not clear is, what
there is about it all
to persuade the recruit.
He is young
and brisk; life at
home in his beautiful
island is one
lazy, long holiday
to him; or if he
wants to work he
can turn out a couple of bags of copra per week and sell it for
four or five shillings a bag. In Queensland he must get up
at dawn and work from eight to twelve hours a day in the
canefields—in a much hotter climate than he is used to—and
get less than four shillings a week for it.
THE KANAKA'S DEPARTURE.
I cannot understand his willingness to go to Queensland.
It is a deep puzzle to me.
Here is the explanation, from the
planter's point of view; at least I gather from the
missionary's
pamphlet that it is the planter's:
"When he comes from his home he is a savage, pure and simple. He
feels no shame at
his nakedness and want of adornment. When he returns
home he does so well dressed,
sporting a Waterbury watch, collars, cuffs,
boots, and jewelry. He takes with him one or more boxes*
"Box" is English for trunk.
well filled withclothing, a musical instrument or two, and perfumery and other articles of
luxury he has learned to appreciate."
THE KANAKA'S RETURN.
For just one moment we have a seeming flash of comprehension
of the
Kanaka's reason for
exiling himself: he
goes away to acquire
civilization. Yes, he
was naked and not
ashamed, now he is
clothed and knows
how to be ashamed;
he was unenlightened,
now he has
a waterbury
watch; he was
unrefined, now he has
jewelry, and something
to make him
smell good; he was a
nobody, a provincial, now he has been to
far countries and
can show off.
It all looks plausible—for a moment. Then the missionary
takes hold of this explanation and pulls it to pieces, and
dances on it, and
damages it beyond recognition.
average sequel is this: The cuffs and collars, if used at all, are carried
off by youngsters, who fasten them round the leg, just below the
knee, as ornaments. The Waterbury, broken and dirty, finds its way to the
trader, who gives a trifle for it; or the inside is taken out, the wheels strung
on a thread and hung round the neck. Knives, axes, calico, and handkerchiefs
are divided among friends, and there is hardly one of these apiece.
The boxes, the keys often lost on the road home, can be bought for 2s. 6d.
They are to be seen rotting outside in almost any shore village on Tanna. (I
speak of what I have seen.) A returned Kanaka has been furiously angry
with me because I would not buy his trousers, which he declared were just
my fit. He sold them afterwards to one of my Aniwan teachers for 9d. worth
of tobacco—a pair of trousers that probably cost him 8s. or 10s. in Queensland.
A coat or shirt is handy for cold weather. The white handkerchiefs,
the 'senet' (perfumery), the umbrella, and perhaps the hat, are kept. The
boots have to take their chance, if they do not happen to fit the copra trader.
'Senet' on the hair, streaks of paint on the face, a dirty white handkerchief
round the neck, strips of turtle shell in the ears, a belt, a sheath and knife,
and an umbrella constitute the rig of returned Kanaka at home the day after
landing."
A hat, an umbrella, a belt, a neckerchief. Otherwise
stark naked. All in a day the
hard-earned "civilization"
has melted away to this. And even these perishable things
must presently go. Indeed, there is but a single detail of his
civilization that
can be depended on to stay by him: according
to the missionary, he has learned to swear.
This is art, and
art is long, as the poet says.
In all countries the laws throw light upon the past. The
Queensland law for the
regulation of the Labor Traffic is a
confession. It is a confession that the evils
charged by the
missionaries upon the traffic had existed in the past, and that
they still existed when the law was made. The missionaries
make a further charge: that
the law is evaded by the recruiters,
and that the
Government Agent sometimes helps them
to do it. Regulation 31 reveals two things: that
sometimes a
young fool of a recruit gets his senses back, after being persuaded
to sign away his liberty for three years, and dearly
wants to get out of the
engagement and stay at home with his
own people; and that threats, intimidation, and
force are used
to keep him on board the recruiting-ship, and to hold him to
his
contract. Regulation 31 forbids these coercions. The law
requires that he shall be
allowed to go free; and another
clause of it requires the recruiter to set him
ashore—per boat,
because of the prevalence of sharks. Testimony from Rev.
Mr. Gray:
"There are 'wrinkles' for taking the penitent Kanaka. My first experience
of the Traffic was a case of this kind in 1884. A vessel anchored
just out of sight of our station, word was brought to me that some boys were
stolen, and the relatives wished me to go and get them back. The facts were,
as I found, that six boys had recruited, had rushed into the boat, the Government
Agent informed me. They had all 'signed'; and, said the Government
Agent, 'on board they shall remain.' I was assured that the six boys were
of age and willing to go. Yet on getting ready to leave the ship I found four
of the lads ready to come ashore in the boat! This I forbade. One of them
jumped into the water and persisted in coming ashore in my boat. When
appealed to, the Government Agent suggested that we go and leave him to
be picked up by the ship's boat, a quarter mile distant at the time!"
The law and the missionaries feel for the repentant recruit
—and properly,
one may be permitted to think, for he is only
a youth and ignorant and persuadable to
his hurt—but sympathy
for him is not kept in stock by the recruiter. Rev. Mr.
Gray says:
"A captain many years in the traffic explained to me how a penitent could
be taken.
'When a boy jumps overboard we just take a boat and pull ahead
of him, then lie between
him and the shore. If he has not tired himself
swimming, and passes the boat, keep on
heading him in this way. The dodge
rarely fails. The boy generally tires of swimming,
gets into the boat of his
own accord, and goes quietly on board."
Yes, exhaustion is likely to make a boy quiet. If the distressed
boy had been the speaker's son, and the captors savages,
the speaker would have
been surprised to see how differently
the thing looked from the new point of view;
however, it is
not our custom to put ourselves in the other person's place.
Somehow there is something pathetic about that disappointed
young savage's resignation.
I must explain, here, that in the
traffic dialect, "boy" does not always mean boy; it
means a
youth above sixteen years of age. That is by Queensland law
the age of
consent, though it is held that recruiters allow themselves
some latitude in guessing at ages.
Captain Wawn of the free spirit chafes under the annoyance
of "cast-iron regulations." They and the missionaries
have poisoned his life. He
grieves for the good old days, vanished
to come no more. See him weep; hear him cuss between
the lines!
"For a long time we were allowed to apprehend and detain all deserters
who had signed the agreement on board ship, but the 'cast-iron' regulations
of the Act of 1884 put a stop to that, allowing the Kanaka to sign the agreement
for three years' service, travel about in the ship in receipt of the regular
rations, cadge all he could, and leave when he thought fit, so long as he did
not extend his pleasure trip to Queensland."
Rev. Mr. Gray calls this same restrictive cast-iron law a
"farce." "There is as much
cruelty and injustice done to
natives by acts that are legal as by deeds unlawful. The
regulations
that exist are unjust and inadequate—unjust and inadequate
they must ever be." He furnishes his reasons for his
position, but they are too
long for reproduction here.
However, if the most a Kanaka advantages himself by a
three-years course in
civilization in Queensland, is a necklace
and an umbrella and a showy imperfection in
the art of swearing,
it must be that all the profit of the traffic goes to the white
man. This could be twisted into a
plausible argument that the
traffic ought to be squarely abolished.
However, there is reason for hope that that can be left alone
to achieve itself. It is
claimed that the traffic will depopulate
its sources of supply within the next twenty or
thirty years.
Queensland is a very healthy place for white people—deathrate
12 in 1,000 of the population—but the Kanaka death-rate
is away above
that. The vital statistics for 1893 place it at 52;
for 1894 (Mackay
district), 68. The first six months of the
Kanaka's exile are peculiarly
perilous for him because of the
rigors of the new climate. The death-rate among the new
men
has reached as high as 180 in the 1,000. In the Kanaka's
native home his
death-rate is 12 in time of peace, and 15 in time
of war. Thus exile to
Queensland—with the opportunity to
acquire civilization, an umbrella, and a
pretty poor quality of
profanity—is twelve times as deadly for him as war.
Common
Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require,
not only that these
people be returned to their homes, but that
war, pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their
preservation.
Concerning these Pacific isles and their peoples an eloquent
prophet spoke long years
ago—five and fifty years ago. In
fact, he spoke a little too early. Prophecy
is a good line of
business, but it is full of risks. This prophet was the Right
Rev. M. Russell, LL.D., D.C.L., of Edinburgh:
"Is the tide of civilization to roll only to the foot of the Rocky Mountains,
and is
the sun of knowledge to set at last in the waves of the Pacific? No;
the mighty day of
four thousand years is drawing to its close; the sun of
humanity has performed its
destined course; but long ere its setting rays are
extinguished in the west, its
ascending beams have glittered on the isles of
the eastern seas. . . . And now we see
the race of Japhet setting forth
to people the isles, and the seeds of another Europe
and a second England
sown in the regions of the sun. But mark the words of the
prophecy: 'He
shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.' It is
not
said Canaan shall be his slave. To the Anglo-Saxon race is
given the scepter of
the globe, but there is not given either the lash of the
slave-driver or the rack
of the executioner. The East will not be stained with the same
atrocities
as the West; the frightful gangrene of an enthralled race is not to mar the
destinies of the family of Japhet in the Oriental world; humanizing, not
destroying, as they advance; uniting with, not enslaving, the inhabitants
with whom
they dwell, the British race may," etc., etc.
And he closes his vision with an invocation from Thomson:
"Come,bright Improvement! on the car of Time,And rule the spacious world from clime to clime."
Very well, Bright Improvement has arrived, you see, with
her civilization, and her
Waterbury, and her umbrella, and her
third-quality profanity, and her
humanizing-not-destroying machinery,
and her
hundred-and-eighty-death-rate, and everything
is going along just as handsome!
But the prophet that speaks last has an advantage over the
pioneer in the business.
Rev. Mr. Gray says:
"What I am concerned about is that we as a Christian nation should wipe
out these
races to enrich ourselves."
And he closes his pamphlet with a grim Indictment which
is as eloquent in its
flowerless straightforward English as is the
hand-painted rhapsody of the early prophet:
"1. It generally demoralizes and always impoverishes the Kanaka, deprives
him of his citizenship, and depopulates the islands fitted to his home."2. It is felt to lower the dignity of the white agricultural laborer in
Queensland, and beyond a doubt it lowers his wages there."3. The whole system is fraught with danger to Australia and the islands
on the score of health."4. On social and political grounds the continuance of the Queensland
Kanaka Labor Traffic must be a barrier to the true federation of the Australian
colonies."5. The Regulations under which the Traffic exists in Queensland are
inadequate to prevent abuses, and in the nature of things they must remain
so."6. The whole system is contrary to the spirit and doctrine of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ. The Gospel requires us to help the weak, but the Kanaka is
fleeced and trodden down."7. The bed-rock of this Traffic is that the life and liberty of a black
man are of less value than those of a white man. And a Traffic that has
grown out of 'slave-hunting' will certainly remain to the end not unlike its
origin."
CHAPTER VII.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
:—For a day or two we have been plowing
among an invisible vast wilderness of islands,
catching now and then a shadowy
glimpse of a member
of it. There does seem to be a prodigious lot of islands
this year; the map of
this region is freckled and fly-specked
all over with them. Their number would seem to
be uncountable.
We are moving among the Fijis
now—224 islands
and islets in the group. In front of us, to the west, the
wilderness
stretches toward Australia, then curves upward to New
Guinea, and still up and up
to Japan; behind us, to the east,
the wilderness stretches sixty degrees across the
wastes of the
Pacific; south of us is New Zealand. Somewhere or other
among these
myriads Samoa is concealed, and not discoverable
on the map. Still, if you wish to go
there, you will have no
trouble about finding it if you follow the directions given by
Robert Louis Stevenson to Dr. Conan Doyle and to Mr. J. M.
Barrie. "You go to
America, cross the continent to San
Francisco, and then it's the second turning to the
left." To
get the full flavor of the joke one must take a glance at
the map.
Wednesday, September 11.—Yesterday we passed close to
an island or so, and recognized the published Fiji characteristics:
a broad belt of clean white coral sand around the
island;
back of it a graceful fringe of leaning palms, with
native huts nestling cosily among
the shrubbery at their
bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic
vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains.
A detail of the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship
perched high up on a reef-bench. This completes the composition,
and makes the picture artistically perfect.
In the afternoon we sighted Suva, the capital of the group,
and threaded our way into
the secluded little harbor—a placid
basin of brilliant blue and green water
tucked snugly in
among the sheltering hills. A few ships rode at anchor in
it—one of them a sailing vessel flying the American flag;
SUVA.
and they said she came from Duluth! There's a journey!Duluth is several thousand miles from the sea, and yet she
is entitled to the proud name of Mistress of the Commercial
Marine of the United States of America. There is only one
free, independent, unsubsidized American ship sailing the foreign
seas, and Duluth owns it. All by itself that ship is
the American fleet. All by itself it causes the American name
and power to be respected in the far regions of the globe. All
by itself it certifies to the world that the most populous civilized
nation in the earth has a just pride in her stupendous
stretch of sea-front, and is determined to assert and maintain
her rightful place as one of the Great Maritime Powers of the
Planet. All by itself it is making foreign eyes familiar with a
Flag which they have not seen before for forty years, outside
of the museum. For what Duluth has done, in building,
equipping, and maintaining at her sole expense the American
Foreign Commercial Fleet, and in thus rescuing the American
name from shame and lifting it high for the homage of the
nations, we owe her a debt of gratitude which our hearts shall
confess with quickened beats whenever her name is named
henceforth. Many national toasts will die in the lapse of time,
but while the flag flies and the Republic survives, they who
live under their shelter will still drink this one, standing and
uncovered: Health and prosperity to Thee, O Duluth, American
Queen of the Alien Seas!
BOATS CAME FROM THE SHORE.
Row-boats began to flock from the shore; their crews
were the first natives we had
seen. These men carried no
overplus of
clothing, and
this was
wise,
for the
weather was
hot. Handsome,
great
dusky men
they were,
muscular,
clean-limbed,
and with
faces full of
character and intelligence. It would be hard to find
their
superiors anywhere among the dark races, I should think.
Everybody went ashore to look around, and spy out the
land, and have that luxury of luxuries to sea-voyagers—a
IN TOWN.
land-dinner. And there we saw morenatives: Wrinkled old women, with their
flat mammals flung over their shoulders,
or hanging down in front like the cold-weather
drip from the molasses-faucet;
plump and smily young girls, blithe and
content, easy and graceful, a pleasure to
look at; young matrons, tall, straight,
comely, nobly built, sweeping by with
chin up, and a gait incomparable for
NATIVES.
unconsciousstateliness
and dignity;
majestic
young men—
athletes for
build and
muscle—
clothed in a
loose arrangement
of dazzling
white, with bronze breast and bronze legs
naked, and the head a cannon-swab of solid hair
combed straight out from the skull and dyed a rich
brick-red. Only sixty years ago they were sunk
in darkness; now they have the bicycle.
OUT OF TOWN.
We strolled about the streets of the white folks'
little town, and around over the
hills by paths and
roads among European dwellings and gardens and
plantations, and
past clumps of hibiscus that made
a body blink, the great blossoms were so intensely
red; and by and by we stopped to ask an elderly English
colonist a question or two, and to sympathize with him conconcerning
the torrid weather; but he was surprised, and said:
"This? This is not hot. You ought to be here in the
summer time once."
"We supposed that this was summer; it has the ear-marks
of it. You could take it to
almost any country and deceive
people with it. But if it isn't summer, what does it
lack?"
"It lacks half a year. This is mid-winter."
THE RIGORS OF WINTER.
I had been suffering from colds for several months, and a
sudden change of season,
like this, could hardly fail to do
me hurt. It brought on another
cold. It is odd, these
sudden jumps from season to
season. A fortnight ago
we
left America in mid-summer,
now it is mid-winter; about a
week hence we
shall arrive
in Australia in the spring.
After dinner I found in
the billiard-room a resident
whom I had known somewhere
else in the world, and
presently made some new
friends and drove with them
out into the country to visit
his Excellency the head of the State, who was
occupying his
country residence, to escape the rigors of the winter weather,
I
suppose, for it was on breezy high ground and much more
comfortable than the lower
regions, where the town is, and
where the winter has full swing, and often sets a
person's
hair afire when he takes off his hat to bow. There is a
noble and
beautiful view of ocean and islands and castellated
peaks from the governor's
high-placed house, and its immediate
surroundings lie drowsing in that dreamy repose and serenity
which are the charm of life in the Pacific Islands.
One of the new friends who went out there with me was
a large man, and I had been
admiring his size all the way. I
was still admiring it as he stood by the governor on
the
veranda, talking; then the Fijian butler stepped out there to
announce tea,
and dwarfed him. Maybe he did not quite
dwarf him, but at any rate the contrast was
quite striking.
Perhaps that dark giant was a king in a condition of political
suspension. I think that in the talk there on the veranda it
was said that in Fiji, as
in the Sandwich Islands, native kings
and chiefs are of much grander size and build than
the commoners.
This man was clothed in flowing white
vestments,
and they were just the thing for him; they comported well
with his
great stature and his kingly port and dignity.
European clothes would have degraded him
and made him
commonplace. I know that, because they do that with everybody
that wears them.
It was said that the old-time devotion to chiefs and reverence
for their persons still survive in the native commoner, and
in great force. The
educated young gentleman who is chief of
the tribe that live in the region about the
capital dresses in the
fashion of high-class European gentlemen, but even his clothes
cannot damn him in the reverence of his people. Their pride
in his lofty rank and
ancient lineage lives on, in spite of his lost
authority and the evil magic of his
tailor. He has no need to
defile himself with work, or trouble his heart with the sordid
cares of life; the tribe will see to it that he shall not want,
and that he shall
hold up his head and live like a gentleman.
I had a glimpse of him down in the town.
Perhaps he is a
descendant of the last king—the king with the difficult name
whose memory is preserved by a notable monument of cut-stone
which one sees in the enclosure in the middle of the town.
Thakombau—I remember, now; that is the name. It is
easier to preserve it on a granite block than in your head.
Fiji was ceded to England by this king in 1858. One of the
gentlemen present at the
governor's quoted a remark made by
the king at the time of the session—a neat
retort, and with
a touch of pathos in it, too. The English Commissioner had
offered a crumb of comfort to Thakombau by saying that the
transfer of the kingdom to
Great Britain was merely "a sort
of hermit-crab formality, you know." "Yes," said poor
Thakombau, "but with this difference—the crab moves into
an unoccupied
shell, but mine isn't."
However, as far as I can make out from the books, the
King was between the devil and
the deep sea at the time, and
hadn't much choice. He owed the United States a large debt
—a debt which he could pay if allowed time, but time was denied
him. He must pay up right away or the warships would
be upon him. To protect his
people from this disaster he
ceded his country to Britain, with a clause in the contract
providing for the ultimate payment of the American debt.
In old times the Fijians were fierce fighters; they were
very religious, and worshiped
idols; the big chiefs were proud
and haughty, and they were men of great style in many
ways;
all chiefs had several wives, the biggest chiefs sometimes had
as many as
fifty; when a chief was dead and ready for burial,
four or five of his wives were
strangled and put into the grave
with him. In 1804 twenty-seven British convicts escaped
from Australia to Fiji, and brought guns and ammunition with
them. Consider what a
power they were, armed like that, and
what an opportunity they had. If they had been
energetic
men and sober, and had had brains and known how to use them,
they could
have achieved the sovereignty of the archipelago—
twenty-seven kings and each
with eight or nine islands under
his scepter. But nothing came of this chance. They lived
worthless lives of sin and luxury, and died without honor—in
most cases by violence. Only one of them had any ambition; he
was an Irishman named Connor. He tried to raise a family of
fifty children, and scored forty-eight. He died lamenting his
failure. It was a foolish sort of avarice. Many a father would
have been rich enough with forty.
It is a fine race, the Fijians, with brains in their heads,
and an inquiring turn of
mind. It appears that their savage
ancestors had a doctrine of immortality in their
scheme of
religion—with limitations. That is to say, their dead friend
would go to a happy hereafter if he could be accumulated,
but not otherwise. They drew
the line; they thought that
the missionary's doctrine was too sweeping, too
comprehensive.
They called his attention to certain facts. For instance,
many of
their friends had been devoured by sharks; the
sharks, in their turn, were caught and
eaten by other men;
later, these men were captured in war, and eaten by the enemy.
The original persons had entered into the composition of the
sharks; next, they and the
sharks had become part of the
flesh and blood and bone of the cannibals. How, then,
could
the particles of the original men be searched out from the
final
conglomerate and put together again? The inquirers
were full of doubts, and considered
that the missionary had
not examined the matter with the gravity and attention which
so serious a thing deserved.
The missionary taught these exacting savages many valuable
things, and got from them one—a very dainty and poetical
idea: Those
wild and ignorant poor children of Nature believed
that the flowers, after they perish,
rise on the winds and float
away to the fair fields of heaven, and flourish there
forever in
immortal beauty!
CHAPTER VIII
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly
native
American criminal class except Congress.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
WHEN one glances at the map the members of the stupendous
island wilderness of the Pacific seem to
crowd upon each other; but no, there is
no crowding,
even in the center of a group; and between
groups there
are lonely wide deserts of sea. Not everything is known
about the
islands, their peoples and their languages. A startling
reminder of this is furnished by the fact that in Fiji,
twenty years ago, were
living two strange and solitary beings
who came from an unknown country and spoke an
unknown
language. "They were picked up by a passing vessel many
hundreds of miles from any known land, floating in the same
tiny canoe in which
they had been blown out to sea. When
found they were but skin and bone. No one could
understand
what they said, and they have never named their country; or,
if they
have, the name does not correspond with that of any
island on any chart. They are now
fat and sleek, and as
happy as the day is long. In the ship's log there is an entry
of the latitude and longitude in which they were found, and
this is probably all
the clue they will ever have to their lost
homes."*
Forbes's "Two Years in Fiji."
What a strange and romantic episode it is; and how one is
tortured with curiosity to
know whence those mysterious
creatures came, those Men Without a Country, errant waifs
who cannot name their lost home, wandering Children of
Nowhere.
Indeed, the Island Wilderness is the very home of romance
and dreams and mystery. The
loneliness, the solemnity, the
beauty, and the deep repose of this wilderness have a
charm
which is all their own for the bruised spirit of men who have
fought and
failed in the struggle for life in the great world;
and for men who have been hunted out
of the great world for
crime; and for other men who love an easy and indolent existence;
and for others who love a roving free life, and
stir
and change and adventure; and for yet others who love an
easy and comfortable
career of trading and money-getting,
mixed with plenty of loose matrimony by purchase,
divorce
without trial or expense, and limitless spreeing thrown in to
make life
ideally perfect.
We sailed again, refreshed.
The most cultivated person in the ship was a young English,
man whose home was in New
Zealand. He was a naturalist.
His learning in his specialty was deep and thorough, his
interest
in his subject amounted to a passion, he had an easy gift of
speech; and so, when
he talked about animals it was a pleasure
to listen to him. And profitable, too, though
he was sometimes
difficult to understand because now and then he used
scientific technicalities
which were above the reach of some of
us. They were pretty sure to be above my reach,
but as he
was quite willing to explain them I always made it a point to
get him to
do it. I had a fair knowledge of his subject—layman's
knowledge—to begin with, but it was his teachings
which crystalized it
into scientific form and clarity—in a word,
gave it value.
His special interest was the fauna of Australasia, and his
knowledge of the matter was
as exhaustive as it was accurate.
I already knew a good deal about the rabbits in
Australasia
and their marvelous fecundity, but in my talks with him I
found that my estimate of the great hindrance and obstruction
inflicted by the rabbit pest upon traffic and travel was far
short of the facts. He told me that the first pair of rabbits
imported into Australasia bred so wonderfully that within six
months rabbits were so thick in the land that people had to
dig trenches through them to get from town to town.
He told me a great deal about worms, and the kangaroo,
and other coleoptera, and said
he knew the history and ways
of all such pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had pockets,
and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples.
And he said that the
emu was as big as an ostrich, and looked
like one, and had an amorphous appetite and
would eat bricks.
Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild
dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo
was that neither of them
barked; otherwise they were just
the same.
He said that the only game-bird in Australia was the wombat,
and the only song-bird the larrikin, and that both were
protected by government.
The most beautiful of the native
birds was the bird of Paradise. Next came the two kinds
of
lyres; not spelt the same. He said the one kind was dying
out, the other
thickening up. He explained that the "Sundowner"
was not a
bird, it was a man; sundowner was
merely the Australian equivalent of our word, tramp.
He is
a loafer, a hard drinker, and a sponge. He tramps across the
country in the
sheep-shearing season, pretending to look for
work; but he always times himself to
arrive at a sheep-run
just at sundown, when the day's labor ends; all he wants is
whisky and supper and bed and breakfast; he gets them and
then disappears. The
naturalist spoke of the bell bird, the
creature that at short intervals all day rings
out its mellow and
exquisite peal from the deeps of the forest. It is the favorite
and best friend of the weary and thirsty sundowner; for he
knows that wherever the bell bird is, there is water; and he
goes somewhere else. The naturalist said that the oddest bird
in Australasia was the Laughing Jackass, and the biggest the
now extinct Great Moa.
The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an
ordinary man's head or kick
his hat off; and his head, too, for
that matter. He said it was wingless, but a swift
runner.
The natives used to ride it. It could make forty miles an
hour, and keep
it up for four hundred miles and come out
reasonably fresh. It was still in existence
when the railway
was introduced into New Zealand; still in existence, and
carrying
the mails. The railroad began with the same schedule
it has now: two expresses a
week—time, twenty miles an
hour. The company exterminated the moa to get the
mails.
Speaking of the indigenous coneys and bactrian camels, the
naturalist said that the
coniferous and bacteriological output of
Australasia was remarkable for its many and
curious departures
from the accepted laws governing these species of tubercles,
but that in his opinion Nature's fondness for dabbling in
the
erratic was most notably exhibited in that curious combination
of bird, fish, amphibian, burrower, crawler, quadruped, and
Christian called the
Ornithorhyncus—grotesquest of animals,
king of the animalculæ of
the world for versatility of character
and make-up. Said he—
"You can call it anything you want to, and be right. It is a fish, for it
lives in the
river half the time; it is a land animal, for it resides on the land
half the time; it
is an amphibian, since it likes both and does not know which
it prefers; it is a
hybernian, for when times are dull and nothing much going
on it buries itself under the
mud at the bottom of a puddle and hybernates
there a couple of weeks at a time; it is a
kind of duck, for it has a duck-bill
and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped
together, for in the
water it swims with the paddles and on shore it paws itself across
country with
them; it is a kind of seal, for it has a seal's fur; it is carnivorous,
herbivorous,
insectivorous, and vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and
butterflies,
and in the season digs worms out of the mud and devours them; it is clearly
OFF GOES HIS HEAD.
a bird, for it lays eggs,
and hatches them; it is
clearly a mammal, for it
nurses its young; and it
is manifestly a kind of
Christian, for it keeps the
Sabbath when there is
anybody around, and
when there isn't, doesn't.
It has all the tastes there
are except refined ones,
it has all the habits there
are except good ones.
WAS NEVER IN THE ARK.
"It is a survival—a
survival of the fittest.
Mr. Darwin invented the
theory that goes by that
name, but the Ornithorhyncus
was the first to
put it to actual experiment
and prove that it
could be done. Hence it
should have as much of
the
credit as Mr. Darwin
It was never in the Ark;
you will find no mention
of it
there; it nobly
stayed out and worked the
theory. Of all creatures
in the
world it was the
only one properly equipped
for the test. The
Ark was thirteen months
afloat, and all the globe
submerged; no land visible
above the flood, no
vegetation, no food for a
mammal to eat, nor water
for a mammal to drink;
for all mammal food was
destroyed, and when the
pure
floods from heaven
and the salt oceans of the
earth mingled their waters
and
rose above the mountain
tops, the result was
a drink which no bird or
beast of ordinary construction could use and live. But this combination was
nuts for the Ornithorhyncus, if I may use a term like that without offense. Its
river home had always been salted by the flood-tides of the sea. On the face of
the Noachian deluge innumerable forest trees were floating. Upon these the
Ornithorhyncus voyaged in peace; voyaged from clime to clime, from hemisphere
to hemisphere, in contentment and comfort, in virile interest in the constant
change of scene, in humble thankfulness for its privileges, in ever-increasing
enthusiam in the development of the great theory upon whose
validity it had staked its life, its fortunes, and its sacred honor, if I may use
such expressions without impropriety in connection with an episode of this
nature.
"It lived the tranquil and luxurious life of a creature of independent
means. Of
things actually necessary to its existence and its happiness not a
detail was wanting.
When it wished to walk, it scrambled along the tree-trunk;
it mused in the shade of the leaves by day, it slept in their shelter by
night; when it
wanted the refreshment of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves
when it wanted a vegetable
diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs;
when it wanted fish it caught them,
when it wanted eggs it laid them. If the
grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another;
and as for fish, the very opu
lence of the supply was an embarrassment. And finally,
when it was thirsty it
smacked its chops in gratitude over a blend that would have slain
a crocodile.
"When at last, after thirteen months of travel and research in all the
Zones it went
aground on a mountain-summit, it strode ashore, saying in its
heart, 'Let them that come
after me invent theories and dream dreams about
the Survival of the Fittest if they
like, but I am the first that has done it!
"This wonderful creature dates back like the kangaroo and many other
Australian
hydrocephalous invertebrates, to an age long anterior to the advent
of man upon the
earth; they date back, indeed, to a time when a causeway
hundreds of miles wide, and
thousands of miles long, joined Australia to
Africa, and the animals of the two
countries were alike, and all belonged to
that remote geological epoch known to science
as the Old Red Grindstone
Post-Pleosaurian. Later the causeway sank under the sea;
subterranean convulsions
lifted the African continent a thousand feet higher than it was before,
but
Australia kept her old level. In Africa's new climate the animals necessarily
began to develop and shade off into new forms and families and species,
but the
animals of Australia as necessarily remained stationary, and have so
remained until this
day. In the course of some millions of years the African
Ornithorhyncus developed and
developed and developed, and sluffed off
detail after detail of its make-up until at
last the creature became wholly disintegrated
and scattered. Whenever you see a bird or a beast or a seal or an
otter in Africa
you know that he is merely a sorry surviving fragment of that
sublime original of whom I
have been speaking—that creature which was
everything in general and nothing
in particular—the opulently endowed e
pluribus unum of
the animal world.
"Such is the history of the most hoary, the most ancient, the most venerable
creature that exists in the earth to-day—Ornithorhyncus
Platypus Extraordinariensis—whom
God preserve!"
When he was strongly moved he could rise and soar like
that with ease. And not only in
the prose form, but in the
poetical as well. He had written many pieces of poetry in his
time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers,
and was willing to let them be copied. It seemed to me
that the
least technical one in the series, and the one which
reached the loftiest note, perhaps,
was his
Perhaps no poet is a conscions plagiarist; but there seems
to be warrant for
suspecting that there is no poet who is not
at one time or another an unconscious one.
The above verses
are indeed beautiful, and, in a way, touching; but there is a
haunting something about them which unavoidably suggests
the Sweet Singer of Michigan.
It can hardly be doubted that
the author had read the works of that poet and been impressed
by them. It is not apparent that he has borrowed
from them any word or yet any
phrase, but the style and swing
and mastery and melody of the Sweet Singer all are there.
Compare this Invocation with "Frank Dutton"—particularly
stanzas first and seventeenth—and I think the reader will feel
convinced that he who wrote the one had read the other:*
The Sentimental Song Book. By Mrs. Julia Moore, p.36.
I."Frank Dutton was as fine a ladAs ever you wish to see,And he was drowned in Pine Island LakeOn earth no more will he be,His age was near fifteen years,And he was a motherless boy,He was living with his grandmotherWhen he was drowned, poor boy.XVII."He was drowned on Tuesday afternoon,On Sunday he was found,And the tidings of that drowned boyWas heard for miles around.His form was laid by his mother's side,Beneath the cold, cold ground,His friends for him will drop a tearWhen they view his little mound."THE NATURALIST.
CHAPTER IX.
It is your human environment that makes climate.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
15—Night. Close to
Australia now. Sydney 50
miles distant.
That note recalls an experience. The passengers
were sent for, to come up in the bow
and see a fine sight. It
was very dark. One could not follow with the eye the surface
of the sea more than fifty yards in any direction—it dimmed
away and
became lost to sight at about that distance from us.
But if you patiently gazed into the
darkness a little while,
there was a sure reward for you. Presently, a quarter of a
mile away you would see a blinding splash or explosion of
light on the
water—a flash so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant
that it would make you catch your breath; then that
blotch of light would
instantly extend itself and take the corkscrew
shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent,
with every curve of its body
and the "break" spreading away
from its head, and the wake following behind its tail
clothed
in a fierce splendor of living fire. And my, but it was coming
at a
lightning gait! Almost before you could think, this monster
of light, fifty feet long, would go flaming and storming
by, and suddenly
disappear. And out in the distance whence
he came you would see another flash; and
another and
another and another, and see them turn into sea-serpents on
the
instant; and once sixteen flashed up at the same time and
came tearing towards us, a
swarm of wiggling curves, a moving
conflagration, a vision of bewildering beauty, a spectacle
of fire and energy whose equal the most of those people will
not see again until after they are dead.
It was porpoises—porpoises aglow with phosphorescent
light. They presently
collected in a wild and magnificent
jumble under the bows, and there they played for an
hour,
leaping and frollicking and carrying on, turning summersaults
in front of
the stem or across it and never getting hit, never
making a miscalculation, though the
stem missed them only
about an inch, as a rule. They were porpoises of the ordinary
length—eight or ten feet—but every twist of their bodies
sent a long procession of united and glowing curves astern.
That fiery jumble was an
enchanting thing to look at, and we
stayed out the performance; one cannot have such a
show as
that twice in a lifetime. The porpoise is the kitten of the
sea; he never
has a serious thought, he cares for nothing but
fun and play. But I think I never saw
him at his winsomest
until that night. It was near a center of civilization, and he
could have been drinking.
By and by, when we had approached to somewhere within
thirty miles of Sydney Heads the
great electric light that is
posted on one of those lofty ramparts began to show, and in
time the little spark grew to a great sun and pierced the firmament
of darkness with a far-reaching sword of light.
Sydney Harbor is shut in behind a precipice that extends
some miles like a wall, and
exhibits no break to the ignorant
stranger. It has a break in the middle, but it makes
so little
show that even Captain Cook sailed by it without seeing it.
Near by that
break is a false break which resembles it, and
which used to make trouble for the
mariner at night, in the
early days before the place was lighted. It caused the memorable
disaster to the Duncan Dunbar, one of the most pathetic
tragedies in the history of that pitiless ruffian, the sea. The
ship was a sailing
vessel; a fine and favorite passenger packet,
commanded by a popular captain of high reputation. She was
due from England, and Sydney was waiting, and counting the
hours; counting the hours, and making ready to give her a
heart-stirring welcome; for she was bringing back a great
company of mothers and daughters, the long-missed light and
bloom of life of Sydney homes; daughters that had been
years absent at school, and mothers that had been with them
all that time watching over them. Of all the world only India
and Australasia have by custom freighted ships and fleets with
their hearts, and know the tremendous meaning of that
phrase; only they know what the waiting is like when this
freightage is entrusted to the fickle winds, not steam, and
what the joy is like when the ship that is returning this treasure
comes safe to port and the long dread is over.
On board the Duncan Dunbar, flying toward Sydney Heads
in the
waning afternoon, the happy home-comers made busy
preparation, for it was not doubted
that they would be in the
arms of their friends before the day was done; they put away
their sea-going clothes and put on clothes meeter for the meeting,
their richest and their loveliest, these poor brides of the
grave.
But the wind lost force, or there was a miscalculation,
and before the Heads were
sighted the darkness came on. It
was said that ordinarily the captain would have made a
safe
offing and waited for the morning; but this was no ordinary
occasion; all
about him were appealing faces, faces pathetic
with disappointment. So his sympathy
moved him to try the
dangerous passage in the dark. He had entered the Heads
seventeen times, and believed he knew the ground. So he
steered straight for the false
opening, mistaking it for the true
one. He did not find out that he was wrong until it
was too
late. There was no saving the ship. The great seas swept
her in and
crushed her to splinters and rubbish upon the rock
tushes at the base of the precipice.
Not one of all that fair
and gracious company was ever seen again alive. The tale
is told to every stranger that passes the spot, and it will continue
to be told to all that come, for generations; but it will
never grow old, custom cannot stale it, the heart-break that
is in it can never perish out of it.
There were two hundred persons in the ship, and but one
survived the disaster. He was
a sailor. A huge sea flung him
up the face of the precipice and stretched him on a
narrow
shelf of rock midway between the top and the bottom, and
there he lay all
night. At any other time he would have lain
there for the rest of his life, without
chance of discovery; but
the next morning the ghastly news swept through Sydney that
the Duncan Dunbar had gone down in sight of home, and
straightway the walls of the Heads were black with mourners;
and one of these,
stretching himself out over the precipice to
spy out what might be seen below,
discovered this miraculously
preserved relic of the wreck. Ropes were brought and the
nearly impossible feat of rescuing the man was accomplished.
He was a person with
a practical turn of mind, and he hired a
hall in Sydney and exhibited himself at
sixpence a head till he
exhausted the output of the gold fields for that year.
We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went
oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up
through the crooks and
turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor—a harbor
which
is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world.
It is not surprising
that the people are proud of it, nor that
they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words.
A returning
citizen asked me what I thought of it, and I testified with
a
cordiality which I judged would be up to the market rate.
I said it was
beautiful—superbly beautiful. Then by a
natural impulse I gave God the
praise. The citizen did not
seem altogether satisfied. He said:
"It is beautiful, of course it's beautiful—the Harbor;
but that isn't all of it, it's only half of it; Sydney's the
other half, and it takes both of them together to ring the
supremacy-bell. God made the Harbor, and that's all right;
but Satan made Sydney."
Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey
it to his friend. He was right
about Sydney being half
of it. It would be beautiful without Sydney, but not above
half as beautiful as it is now, with Sydney added. It is shaped
somewhat like an
oak-leaf—a roomy sheet of lovely blue
water, with narrow off-shoots of water
running up into the
country on both sides between long fingers of land, high
wooden ridges with sides sloped like graves. Handsome
villas are perched here and there
on these ridges, snuggling
amongst the foliage, and one catches alluring glimpses of
them
as the ship swims by toward the city. The city clothes a cluster
of hills and
a ruffle of neighboring ridges with its undulating
masses of masonry, and out of these
masses spring towers
and spires and
other architectural
dignities
and grandeursthat
break
the flowing
lines and give
picturesqueness
to the
general effect.
VIEW IN SYDNEY HARBOR.
The narrow
inlets which I
have mentioned
go wandering out into the land everywhere and hiding
themselves in it, and
pleasure-launches are always exploring
them with picnic parties on board. It is said by trustworthy
people that if you explore them all you will find that you
have covered 700 miles of water passage. But there are liars
everywhere this year, and they will double that when their
works are in good going order.
October was close at hand, spring was come. It was really
spring—everybody
said so; but you could have sold it for
summer in Canada, and nobody would have
suspected. It was
the very weather that makes our home summers the perfection
of
climatic luxury; I mean, when you are out in the wood or
by the sea. But these people
said it was cool, now—a person
ought to see Sydney in the summer time if he
wanted to know
what warm weather is; and he ought to go north ten or fifteen
hundred miles if he wanted to know what hot weather is.
They said that away up there
toward the equator the hens
laid fried eggs. Sydney is the place to go to get
information
about other people's climates. It seems to me that the occupation
of Unbiased Traveler Seeking Information is the pleasantest
and most irresponsible trade there is. The traveler can
always find out anything
he wants to, merely by asking. He
can get at all the facts, and more. Everybody helps
him, nobody
hinders him. Anybody who has an old fact in stock that
is no longer negotiable in
the domestic market will let him
have it at his own price. An accumulation of such goods
is
easily and quickly made. They cost almost nothing and they
bring par in the
foreign market. Travelers who come to
America always freight up with the same old
nursery tales
that their predecessors selected, and they carry them back and
always work them off without any trouble in the home market.
If the climates of the world were determined by parallels
of latitude, then we could
know a place's climate by its position
on the map; and so we should know that the climate of
Sydney was the counterpart
of the climate of Columbia, S. C.,
and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is about the same
distance south of the equator that those other towns are north
of it—thirty-four degrees. But no, climate disregards the
parallels of latitude. In Arkansas they have a winter; in
Sydney they have the name of it, but not the thing itself. I
have seen the ice in the Mississippi floating past the mouth of
the Arkansas river; and at Memphis, but a little way above,
the Mississippi has been frozen over, from bank to bank. But
they have never had a cold spell in Sydney which brought the
mercury down to freezing point. Once in a mid-winter day
there, in the month of July, the mercury went down to 36°,
and that remains the memorable "cold day" in the history of
the town. No doubt Little Rock has seen it below zero. Once,
in Sydney, in mid-summer, about New Year's Day, the mercury
went up to 106°in the shade, and that is Sydney's memorable
hot day. That would about tally with Little Rock's
hottest day also, I imagine. My Sydney figures are taken
from a government report, and are trustworthy. In the matter
of summer weather Arkansas has no advantage over Sydney,
perhaps, but when it comes to winter weather, that is
another affair. You could cut up an Arkansas winter into a
hundred Sydney winters and have enough left for Arkansas
and the poor.
The whole narrow, hilly belt of the Pacific side of New
South Wales has the climate of
its capital—a mean winter temperature
of 54°and a mean summer one of 71°. It is a climate
which
cannot be improved upon for healthfulness. But the
experts say that 90°in New
South Wales is harder to bear
than 112°in the neighboring colony of Victoria,
because the
atmosphere of the former is humid, and of the latter dry.
The mean temperature of the southernmost point of New
South Wales is the same as that
of Nice—60°—yet Nice is
further from the equator by 460
miles than is the former.
But Nature is always stingy of perfect climates; stingier
in the case of Australia
than usual. Apparently this vast
continent has a really good climate nowhere but around
the
edges.
If we look at a map of the world we are surprised to see
how big Australia is. It is
about two-thirds as large as the
United States was before we added Alaska.
But where as one finds a sufficiently good climate and fertile
land almost everywhere in the United States, it seems settled
that inside of the Australian border-belt one finds many
deserts and in spots a
climate which nothing can stand except a
few of the hardier kinds of rocks. In effect,
Australia is as
yet unoccupied. If you take a map of the United States and
leave
the Atlantic sea-board States in their places; also the
fringe of Southern States from
Florida west to the Mouth of
the Mississippi; also a narrow, inhabited streak up the
Mississippi
half-way to its head waters; also a narrow, inhabited
border along the Pacific
coast: then take a brushful of paint
and obliterate the whole remaining mighty stretch
of country
that lies between the Atlantic States and the Pacific-coast
strip, your
map will look like the latest map of Australia.
This stupendous blank is hot, not to say torrid; a part of it
is fertile, the rest is
desert; it is not liberally watered; it has
no towns. One has only to cross the
mountains of New South
Wales and descend into the westward-lying regions to find
that he has left the choice climate behind him, and found a
new one of a quite different character. In fact, he would not
know by the thermometer that he was not in the blistering
Plains of India. Captain Sturt, the great explorer, gives us a
sample of the heat.
"The wind, which had been blowing all the morning from the N.E., increased
to a heavy gale, and I shall never forget its withering effect. I
sought shelter
behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of heat were so terrific
that I wondered the very grass did not take fire. This really was nothing ideal:
everything both animate and inanimate gave way before it; the horses stood
with their
backs to the wind and their noses to the ground, without the muscular
strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves of the
trees
under which we were sitting fell like a snow shower around us. At noon
I took a thermometer graded to 127°, out of my box, and observed that the
mercury was up to 125°. Thinking that it had been unduly influenced, I put
it in the fork of a tree close to me, sheltered alike from the wind and the sun.
I
went to examine it about an hour afterwards, when I found the mercury
had risen to the
top of the instrument and had burst the bulb, a circumstance
that
I believe no traveler has ever before had to record. I cannot find language
to convey to the reader's mind an idea of the intense and oppressive
nature of the
heat that prevailed."
That hot wind sweeps over Sydney sometimes, and brings
with it what is called a
"dust-storm." It is said that most
Australian towns are acquainted with the dust-storm.
I think I
know what it is like, for the following description by Mr. Gane
tallies
very well with the alkali dust-storm of Nevada, if you
leave out the "shovel" part.
Still the shovel part is a pretty
important part, and seems to indicate that my Nevada
storm
is but a poor thing, after all.
"As we proceeded the altitude became less, and the heat proportionately
greater until
we reached Dubbo, which is only 600 feet above sea-level. It is
a pretty town, built on
an extensive plain. … After the effects of a
shower of rain have passed away
the surface of the ground crumbles into a
thick layer of dust, and occasionally, when
the wind is in a particular quarter,
it is lifted bodily from the ground in one long opaque cloud. In the
midst of such
a storm nothing can be seen a few yards ahead, and the unlucky person who
happens to be out at the time is compelled to seek the nearest retreat at hand
When the thrifty housewife sees in the distance the dark column advancing in
a steady
whirl towards her house, she closes the doors and windows with all
expedition. A
drawing-room, the window of which has been carelessly left
open during a dust-storm, is
indeed an extraordinary sight. A lady who has
resided in Dubbo for some years says that
the dust lies so thick on the carpet
that it is necessary to use a shovel to remove it."
And probably a wagon. I was mistaken; I have not seen
a proper dust-storm. To my mind
the exterior aspects and
character of Australia are fascinating things to look at and
think about, they are so strange, so weird, so new, so uncommonplace,
such a startling and interesting contrast to the other
sections of the planet, the sections that are known to us all,
familiar to us all. In
the matter of particulars—a detail here,
a detail there—we have
had the choice climate of New South
Wales' sea-coast; we have had the Australian heat as
furnished
by Captain Sturt; we have had the wonderful dust-storm; and
we have
considered the phenomenon of an almost empty hot
wilderness half as big as the United
States, with a narrow belt
of civilization, population, and good climate around it.
A DUST STORM.
CHAPTER X.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but
sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Cook found Australia in 1770, and eighteen
years
later the British Government began to transport
convicts to it. Altogether, New South
Wales received
83,000 in 53 years. The convicts wore heavy chains; they
were
ill-fed and badly treated by the officers set over them;
they were heavily punished for
even slight infractions of the
rules; "the cruelest discipline ever known" is one
historian's
description of their life.*
The Story of Australasia. J.S. Laurie.
English law was hard-hearted in those days. For trifling
offenses which in our day
would be punished by a small fine or
a few days' confinement, men, women, and boys were
sent to
this other end of the earth to serve terms of seven and fourteen
years;
and for serious crimes they were transported for life.
Children were sent to the penal
colonies for seven years for
stealing a rabbit!
When I was in London twenty-three years ago there was
a new penalty in force for
diminishing garroting and wifebeating—25
lashes on the bare back with the cat-o'-nine-tails.
It was said that this terrible
punishment was able to bring the
stubbornest ruffians to terms; and that no man had been
found
with grit enough to keep his emotions to himself beyond the
ninth blow; as a
rule the man shrieked earlier. That penalty
had a great and wholesome effect upon the
garroters and wife-beaters;
but humane modern London
could not endure it; it
got its law rescinded. Many a bruised and battered English
wife has since had occasion to deplore that cruel achievement
of sentimental "humanity."
Twenty-five lashes! In Australia and Tasmania they gave
a convict fifty for almost any
little offense; and sometimes
a brutal officer would add fifty, and then another fifty,
and so
on, as long as the sufferer could endure the torture and live.
In Tasmania
I read the entry, in an old manuscript official
record, of a case where a convict was
given three hundred
lashes—for stealing some silver spoons. And men got more
than that,
sometimes. Who handled the cat? Often it was
another convict; sometimes it was the
culprit's dearest comrade;
and he had to lay on with all his
might; otherwise he
would get a flogging himself for his mercy—for he was
under
watch—and yet not do his friend any good: the friend would
be
attended to by another hand and suffer no lack in the
matter of full punishment.
The convict life in Tasmania was so unendurable, and suicide
so difficult to accomplish that once or twice despairing
men got together and drew
straws to determine which of them
should kill another of the group—this
murder to secure death
to the perpetrator and to the witnesses of it by the hand of the
hangman!
The incidents quoted above are mere hints, mere suggestions
of what convict life was like—they are but a couple of
details tossed
into view out of a shoreless sea of such; or, to
change the figure, they are but a pair
of flaming steeples
photographed from a point which hides from sight the burning
city which stretches away from their bases on every hand.
Some of the
convicts—indeed, a good many of them—
were very bad people, even
for that day; but the most of them
were probably not noticeably worse than the average
of the
people they left behind them at home. We must believe this;
we cannot avoid it. We are obliged to believe that a nation
that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing
women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents' worth of bacon or
rags, and boys snatched from their mothers, and men from
their families, and sent to the other side of the world for long
terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was a nation to
whom the term "civilized" could not in any large way be applied.
And we must also believe that a nation that knew, during
more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles
and was still content with it, was not advancing in any showy
way toward a higher grade of civilization.
If we look into the characters and conduct of the officers
and gentlemen who had
charge of the convicts and attended
to their backs and stomachs, we must grant again
that as between
the convict and his masters, and between both and
the nation at home, there was a
quite noticeable monotony of
sameness.
Four years had gone by, and many convicts had come.
Respectable settlers were
beginning to arrive. These two
classes of colonists had to be protected, in case of
trouble
among themselves or with the natives. It is proper to mention
the natives,
though they could hardly count they were so
scarce. At a time when they had not as yet
begun to be much
disturbed—not as yet being in the way—it was
estimated
that in New South Wales there was but one native to 45,000
acres of
territory.
People had to be protected. Officers of the regular army
did not want this
service—away off there where neither honor
nor distinction was to be gained.
So England recruited and
officered a kind of militia force of 1,000 uniformed civilians
called the "New South Wales Corps" and shipped it.
This was the worst blow of all. The colony fairly staggered
under it. The Corps was an
object-lesson of the moral condition
of England outside of the jails. The colonists trembled.
It was feared that next there would be an importation of the
nobility.
In those early days the colony was non-supporting. All
the necessaries of
life—food, clothing, and all—were sent out
from England, and kept
in great government store-houses, and
given to the convicts and sold to the
settlers—sold at a trifling
advance upon cost. The Corps saw its opportunity.
Its
officers went into commerce, and in a most lawless way. They
went to importing
rum, and also to manufacturing it in private
stills, in defiance of the government's
commands and protests.
They leagued themselves together and ruled the market; they
boycotted the government and the other dealers; they established
a close monopoly and kept it strictly in their own hands.
When a vessel arrived
with spirits, they allowed nobody to buy
but themselves, and they forced the owner to
sell to them at a
price named by themselves—and it was always low enough.
They bought rum at an average of two dollars a gallon and
sold it at an average of
ten. They made rum the currency of
the country—for
there was little or no money—and they
maintained their devastating hold and
kept the colony under
their heel for eighteen or twenty years before they were finally
conquered and routed by the government.
Meantime, they had spread intemperance everywhere. And
they had squeezed farm after
farm out of the settlers' hands
for rum, and thus had bountifully enriched themselves.
When
a farmer was caught in the last agonies of thirst they took
advantage of him
and sweated him for a drink.
In one instance they sold a man a gallon of rum worth two
dollars for a piece of
property which was sold some years later
for $100,000.
When the colony was about eighteen or twenty years old it
was discovered that the land
was specially fitted for the wool
culture. Prosperity followed, commerce with the world began,
by and by rich mines of the noble metals were opened, immigrants
flowed in, capital likewise. The result is the great and
wealthy and enlightened commonwealth of New South Wales.
It is a country that is rich in mines, wool ranches, trams,
railways, steamship lines,
schools, newspapers, botanical gardens,
art galleries,
libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies;
it is
the hospitable home of every species of culture and of
every species of material
enterprise, and there is a church at
every man's door, and a race-track over the way.
NEW SOUTH WALES CORPS.
CHAPTER XI.
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—
and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will
never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will
never
sit down on a cold one any more.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
English-speaking colonies are made up of lavishly
hospitable people, and New South Wales and its capital
are like the rest in this. The English-speaking
colony of the United States of
America is always called lavishly
hospitable by the English traveler. As to the other
English-speaking colonies
throughout the world from Canada
all around, I know by experience that the description
fits them.
I will not go more particularly into this matter, for I find that
when
writers try to distribute their gratitude here and there
and yonder by detail they run
across difficulties and do some
ungraceful stumbling.
Mr. Gane ("New South Wales and Victoria in 1885"),
tried to
distribute his gratitude, and was not lucky:
"The inhabitants of Sydney are renowned for their hospitality. The
treatment which we
experienced at the hands of this generous-hearted people
will help more than anything
else to make us recollect with pleasure our stay
amongst them. In the character of
hosts and hostesses they excel. The
'new chum' needs only the acquaintanceship of one
of their number, and he
becomes at once the happy recipient of numerous complimentary
invitations
and thoughtful kindnesses. Of the towns it has been our good fortune to
visit, none have portrayed home so faithfully as Sydney."
Nobody could say it finer than that. If he had put in his
cork then, and stayed away
from Dubbo—but no; heedless
man, he pulled it again. Pulled it when he was
away along
in his book, and his memory of what he had said about Sydney
had grown
dim:
"We cannot quit the promising town of Dubbo without testifying, in
warm praise, to the kind-hearted and hospitable usages of its inhabitants.
Sydney, though well deserving the character it bears of its kindly treatment
of strangers, possesses a little formality and reserve. In Dubbo, on the contrary,
though the same congenial manners prevail, there is a pleasing degree
of respectful familiarity which gives the town a homely comfort not often met
with elsewhere. In laying on one side our pen we feel contented in having
been able, though so late in this work, to bestow a panegyric, however unpretentious,
on a town which, though possessing no picturesque natural surroundings,
nor interesting architectural productions, has yet a body of citizens
whose hearts cannot but obtain for their town a reputation for benevolence
and kind-heartedness."
HEEDLESS MAN.
I wonder what soured him on Sydney. It seems strange
that a pleasing degree of three
or four
fingers of respectful familiarity should fill
a man up and give him the
panegyrics so
bad. For he has them, the worst way—
any one can see that. A man who is
perfectly at himself does not throw cold
detraction at people's architectural productions
and picturesque surroundings,
and let on that what he prefers is a Dubbonese
dust-storm and a pleasing degree
of respectful familiarity No, these are
old, old symptoms; and when they appear
we know that the man has got the panegyrics.
Sydney has a population of 400,000. When a stranger
from America steps ashore there,
the first thing that strikes
him is that the place is eight or nine times as large as he
was
expecting it to be; and the next thing that strikes him is that
it is an
English city with American trimmings. Later on, in
Melbourne, he will find the American
trimmings still more in
evidence; there, even the architecture will often suggest
America; a photograph of its stateliest business street might
be passed upon him for a
picture of the finest street in a large
American city. I was told that the most of the
fine residences
were the city residences of squatters. The name seemed out
of focus somehow. When the explanation came, it offered a
new instance of the curious changes which words, as well as animals,
undergo through change of habitat and climate. With
us, when you speak of a squatter you are always supposed to
be speaking of a poor man, but in Australia when you speak
of a squatter you are supposed to be speaking of a millionaire;
in America the word indicates the possessor of a few acres and
a doubtful title, in Australia it indicates a man whose land-front
is as long as a railroad, and whose title has been perfected
in one way or another; in America the word indicates
a man who owns a dozen head of live stock, in Australia a
man who owns anywhere from fifty thousand up to half a
million head; in America the word indicates a man who is
obscure and not important, in Australia a man who is prominent
and of the first importance; in America you take off
your hat to no squatter, in Australia you do; in America if
your uncle is a squatter you keep it dark, in Australia you advertise
it; in America if your friend is a squatter nothing
comes of it, but with a squatter for your friend in Australia
you may sup with kings if there are any around.
In Australia it takes about two acres and a half of pasture-land
(some people say twice as many), to support a sheep; and
when
the squatter has half a million sheep his private domain
is about as large as Rhode
Island, to speak in general terms.
His annual wool crop may be worth a quarter or a half
million
dollars.
He will live in a palace in Melbourne or Sydney or some
other of the large cities, and
make occasional trips to his
sheep-kingdom several hundred miles away in the great
plains
to look after his battalions of riders and shepherds and other
hands. He
has a commodious dwelling out there, and if he
approve of you he will invite you to
spend a week in it, and
SQUATTER LIFE.
will make you at home and comfortable, and let you see the
great industry in all its details, and feed you and slake you
and smoke you with the best that money can buy.
On at least one of these vast estates there is a considerable
town, with all the
various businesses and occupations that go
to make an important town; and the town and
the land it
stands upon are the property of the squatters. I have seen
that town,
and it is not unlikely that there are other squatter-owned
towns in Australia.
Australia supplies the world not only with fine wool, but
with mutton also. The modern
invention of cold storage and
its application in ships has created this great trade. In
Sydney
I visited a huge establishment where they kill and clean
and solidly freeze a
thousand sheep a day, for shipment to
England.
The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably
from Americans, either in
dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation,
inflections, or general appearance. There were
fleeting and
subtle suggestions of their English origin, but these were not
pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one's attention. The
people have easy and cordial
manners from the beginning—
from the moment that the introduction is
completed. This is
American. To put it in another way, it is English friendliness
with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out.
Now and then—but this is rare—one hears such words as
piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from
lips whence one would not expect such
pronunciations to come.
There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation
is an Australianism, but people who have been "home"
—as the native
reverently and lovingly calls England—know
better. It is "costermonger." All
over Australasia this pronunciation
is nearly as common among servants as it is in London
among the uneducated and the partially educated of all
sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid y is rather striking
when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to
enable it to show up. In the hotel in Sydney the chambermaid
said, one morning—
"The tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is
ready I'll tell the wyter
to bring up the breakfast."
I have made passing mention, a moment ago, of the native
Australasian's custom of
speaking of England as "home." It
was always pretty to hear it, and often it was said in
an unconsciously
caressing way that made it touching; in a way
which transmuted a sentiment into an
embodiment, and made
one seem to see Australasia as a young girl stroking mother
England's old gray head.
In the Australasian home the table-talk is vivacious and
unembarrassed; it is without
stiffness or restraint. This does
not remind one of England so much as it does of
America.
But Australasia is strictly democratic, and reserves and restraints
are things that are bred by differences of rank.
English and colonial audiences are phenomenally alert and
responsive. Where masses of
people are gathered together in
England, caste is submerged, and with it the English
reserve;
equality exists for the moment, and every individual is free;
so free
from any consciousness of fetters, indeed, that the Englishman's
habit of watching himself and guarding himself
against any injudicious exposure of
his feelings is forgotten,
and falls into abeyance—and to such a degree
indeed, that he
will bravely applaud all by himself if he wants to—an exhibition
of daring which is unusual elsewhere in the world.
But it is hard to move a new English acquaintance when he
is by himself, or when the
company present is small, and new
to him. He is on his guard then, and his natural
reserve is to
the fore. This has given him the false reputation of being
without
humor and without the appreciation of humor.
Americans are not Englishmen, and American humor is not
English humor; but both the American and his humor had
their origin in England, and have merely undergone changes
brought about by changed conditions and a new environment.
About the best humorous speeches I have yet heard were a
couple that were made in Australia at club suppers—one of
them by an Englishman, the other by an Australian.
CHAPTER XII.
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow-Yet
it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Sydney I had a large dream, and in the course of talk I
told it to a missionary from India who was on his way to
visit some relatives in New
Zealand. I dreamed that the
visible universe is the physical person of God; that the
vast
worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields
of space
are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we
and the other creatures are the
microbes that charge with
multitudinous life the corpuscles.
Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then
said:
"It is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are the
metes and
bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that it almost accounts
for a thing which is otherwise nearly unaccountable—the origin of
the
sacred legends of the Hindoos. Perhaps they dream them, and then honestly
believe them to be divine revelations of fact. It looks like that, for the
legends are built on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that
plodding
priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake."
He told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly
believed by all classes of Hindoos, including those of
high social position and
intelligence; and he said that this
universal credulity was a great hindrance to the
missionary in
his work. Then he said something like this:
"At home, people wonder why Christianity does not make faster progress
in India. They
hear that the Indians believe easily, and that they have a
natural trust in miracles and
give them a hospitable reception. Then they
argue like this: since the Indian believes
easily, place Christianity before them
and they must believe; confirm its truths by the
biblical miracles, and they
will no longer doubt. The natural deduction is, that as
Christianity makes
but indifferent progress in India, the fault is with us: we are not fortunate in
presenting the doctrines and the miracles.
"But the truth is, we are not by any means so well equipped as they think.
We have not the easy task that they imagine. To use a military figure, we
are sent against the enemy with good powder in our guns, but only wads for
bullets; that
is to say, our miracles are not effective; the Hindoos do not care
for them; they have
more extraordinary ones of their own. All the details of
their own religion are proven
and established by miracles; the details of ours
must be proven in the same way. When I
first began my work in India I
greatly underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my
task. A correction
was not long in coming. I thought as our friends think at
home—that to
prepare my childlike wonder-lovers to listen with favor to my
grave message
I only needed to charm the way to it with wonders, marvels, miracles. With
full confidence I told the wonders performed by Samson, the strongest man
that had
ever lived—for so I called him.
"At first I saw lively anticipation and strong interest in the faces of my
people, but
as I moved along from incident to incident of the great story, I
was distressed to see
that I was steadily losing the sympathy of my audience.
I could not understand it. It
was a surprise to me, and a disappointment.
Before I was through, the fading sympathy
had paled to indifference.
Thence to the end the indifference remained; I was not able
to make any impression
upon it.
"A good old Hindoo gentleman told me where my trouble lay. He
said 'We Hindoos
recognize a god by the work of his hands—we accept no
other testimony.
Apparently, this is also the rule with you Christians. And
we know when a man has his
power from a god by the fact that he does
things which he could not do, as a man, with
the mere powers of a man.
Plainly, this is the Christian's way also, of knowing when a
man is working
by a god's power and not by his own. You saw that there was a
supernatural
property in the hair of Samson; for you perceived that when his hair was
gone he was as other men. It is our way, as I have said. There are many
nations in
the world, and each group of nations has its own gods, and will pay
no worship to the
gods of the others. Each group believes its own gods to
be strongest, and it will not
exchange them except for gods that shall be proven
to be their superiors in power. Man
is but a weak creature, and needs the
help of gods—he cannot do without it.
Shall he place his fate in the hands
of weak gods when there may be stronger ones to be
found? That would be
foolish. No, if he hear of gods that are stronger than his own, he
should not
turn a deaf ear, for it is not a light matter that is at stake. How then
shall
he determine which gods are the stronger, his own or those that preside over
the concerns of other nations? By comparing the known works of his own
gods with the
works of those others; there is no other way. Now, when we
make this comparison, we are
not drawn towards the gods of any other nation.
Our gods are shown by their works to be
the strongest, the most powerful.
The Christians have but few gods, and they are
new—new, and not strong,
as it seems to us. They will increase in number, it
is true, for this has happened
with all gods, but that time is far away, many ages and decades of
ages away, for gods multiply slowly, as is meet for beings to whom a thousand
years is but a single moment. Our own gods have been born millions
of years apart. The process is slow, the gathering of strength and power is
similarly slow. In the slow lapse of the ages the steadily accumulating power
of our gods has at last become prodigious. We have a thousand proofs of
this in the colossal character of their personal acts and the acts of ordinary men
to whom they have given supernatural qualities. To your Samson was given
supernatural power, and when he broke the withes, and slew the thousands
with the jawbone of an ass, and carried away the gates of the city upon his
shoulders, you were amazed—and also awed, for you recognized the divine
source of his strength. But it could not profit to place these things before
your Hindoo congregation and invite their wonder; for they would compare
them with the deed done by Hanuman, when our gods infused their divine
strength into his muscles; and they would be indifferent to them—as you
saw. In the old, old times, ages and ages gone by, when our god Rama was
warring with the demon god of Ceylon, Rama bethought him to bridge the
sea and connect Ceylon with India, so that his armies might pass easily
over; and he sent his general, Hanuman, inspired like your own Samson with
divine strength, to bring the materials for the bridge. In two days Hanuman
strode fifteen hundred miles, to the Himalayas, and took upon his shoulder a
range of those lofty mountains two hundred miles long, and started with it
toward Ceylon. It was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain, the
people of Govardhun heard the thunder of his tread and felt the earth rocking
under it, and they ran out, and there, with their snowy summits piled to
heaven, they saw the Himalayas passing by. And as this huge continent swept
along overshadowing the earth, upon its slopes they discerned the twinkling
lights of a thousand sleeping villages, and it was as if the constellations were
filing in procession through the sky. While they were looking, Hanuman
stumbled, and a small ridge of red sandstone twenty miles long was jolted
loose and fell. Half of its length has wasted away in the course of the ages,
but the other ten miles of it remain in the plain by Govardhun to this day as
proof of the might of the inspiration of our gods. You must know, yourself,
that Hanuman could not have carried those mountains to Ceylon except
by the strength of the gods. You know that it was not done by his own
strength, therefore, you know that it was done by the strength of the gods,
just as you know that Samson carried the gates by the divine strength and not by
his own. I think you must concede two things: First, That in carrying the
gates of the city upon his shoulders, Samson did not establish the superiority
of his gods over ours; secondly, That his feat is not supported by any
but verbal evidence, while Hanuman's is not only supported by verbal evidence,
but this evidence is confirmed, established, proven, by visible, tangible
evidence, which is the strongest of all testimony. We have the sandstone
ridge, and while it remains we cannot doubt, and shall not. Have you the
gates?'"
HANUMAN MOVING THE MOUNTAINS.
CHAPTER XIII.
The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. The bold man strikes
for double
value and compromises on par.
—Puddn'head Wilson's New Calendar.
is sure to be struck by the liberal way in which
Australasia spends money upon public works—such
as legislative buildings,
town halls, hospitals, asylums,
parks, and botanical gardens. I should say that where
minor
towns in America spend a hundred dollars on the town hall
and on public
parks and gardens, the like towns in Australasia
spend a thousand. And I think that this
ratio will hold good
in the matter of hospitals, also. I have seen a costly and well-equipped,
and architecturally handsome hospital in an
Australian
village of fifteen hundred inhabitants. It was built by
private funds furnished by
the villagers and the neighboring
planters, and its running expenses were drawn from the
same
sources. I suppose it would be hard to match this in any
country. This
village was about to close a contract for lighting
its streets with the electric light, when I was there. That
is ahead of London.
London is still obscured by gas—gas
pretty widely scattered, too, in some of
the districts; so widely
indeed, that except on moonlight nights it is difficult to find
the gas lamps.
The botanical garden of Sydney covers thirty-eight acres,
beautifully laid out and
rich with the spoil of all the lands and
all the climes of the world. The garden is on
high ground in
the middle of the town, overlooking the great harbor, and it
adjoins the spacious grounds of Government House—fifty-six
acres; and at hand
also, is a recreation ground containing
eighty-two acres. In addition, there are the zoölogical gardens,
the race-course, and the great cricket-grounds where the international
matches are played. Therefore there is plenty of
room for reposeful lazying and lounging, and for exercise too,
for such as like that kind of work.
There are four specialties attainable in the way of social
pleasure. If you enter your
name on the Visitor's Book at
Government House you will receive an invitation to the
next
ball that takes place there, if nothing can be proven against
you. And it
will be very pleasant; for you will see everybody
except the Governor, and add a number
of acquaintances and
several friends to your list. The Governor will be in England.
He always is. The continent has four or five governors, and I
do not know how many
it takes to govern the outlying
archipelago; but anyway you will not see them. When they
are appointed they come out from England and get inaugurated,
and give a ball, and
help pray for rain, and get aboard ship
and go back home. And so the Lieutenant-Governor
has to
do all the work. I was in Australasia three months and a half,
and saw only
one Governor. The others were at home.
The Australasian Governor would not be so restless, perhaps,
if he had a war, or a veto, or something like that to call
for his
reserve-energies, but he hasn't. There isn't any war,
and there isn't any veto in his
hands. And so there is really
little or nothing doing in his line. The country governs
itself,
and prefers to do it; and is so strenuous about it and so jealous
of its
independence that it grows restive if even the Imperial
Government at home proposes to
help; and so the Imperial
veto, while a fact, is yet mainly a name.
Thus the Governor's functions are much more limited than
are a Governor's functions
with us. And therefore more
fatiguing. He is the apparent head of the State, he is the
real
head of Society. He represents culture, refinement, elevated
SYDNEY'S FOUR ENTERTAINMENTS.
sentiment, polite life, religion; and by his example he propagates
these, and they spread and flourish and bear good fruit.
He creates the fashion, and leads it. His ball is the ball of
balls, and his countenance makes the horse-race thrive.
He is usually a lord, and this is well; for his position compels
him to lead an expensive life, and an English lord is
generally well equipped for
that.
Another of Sydney's social pleasures is the visit to the
Admiralty House; which is
nobly situated on high ground
overlooking the water. The trim boats of the service
convey
the guests thither; and there, or on board the flag-ship, they
have the
duplicate of the hospitalities of Government House.
The Admiral commanding a station in
British waters is a
magnate of the first degree, and he is sumptuously housed, as
becomes the dignity of his office.
Third in the list of special pleasures is the tour of the
harbor in a fine steam
pleasure-launch. Your richer friends
own boats of this kind, and they will invite you,
and the joys
of the trip will make a long day seem short.
And finally comes the shark-fishing. Sydney Harbor is
populous with the finest breeds
of man-eating sharks in the
world. Some people make their living catching them; for the
Government pays a cash bounty on them. The larger the
shark the larger the bounty,
and some of the sharks are twenty
feet long. You not only get the bounty, but everything
that
is in the shark belongs to you. Sometimes the contents are
quite valuable.
The shark is the swiftest fish that swims. The speed of
the fastest steamer afloat is
poor compared to his. And he is
a great gad-about, and roams far and wide in the oceans,
and
visits the shores of all of them, ultimately, in the course of his
restless
excursions. I have a tale to tell now, which has not
as yet been in print. In 1870 a
young stranger arrived in
Sydney, and set about finding something to do; but he knew
no one, and brought no recommendations, and the result was
that he got no employment. He had aimed high, at first, but
as time and his money wasted away he grew less and less
exacting, until at last he was willing to serve in the humblest
capacities if so he might get bread and shelter. But luck was
still against him; he could find no opening of any sort.
Finally his money was all gone. He walked the streets all day,
thinking; he walked them all night, thinking, thinking, and
growing hungrier and hungrier. At dawn he found himself
well away from the town and drifting aimlessly along the
harbor shore. As he was passing by a nodding shark-fisher
the man looked up and said—
"Say, young fellow, take my line a spell, and change my
luck for me."
"How do you know I won't make it worse?"
"Because you can't. It has been at its worst all night.
If you can't change it, no
harm's done; if you do change it,
it's for the better, of course. Come."
"All right, what will you give?"
"I'll give you the shark, if you catch one."
"And I will eat it, bones and all. Give me the line."
"Here you are. I will get away, now, for awhile, so that
my luck won't spoil yours;
for many and many a time I've
noticed that if—there, pull in, pull in, man,
you've got a bite!
Iknew how it would be. Why, I knew you for a born son of
luck the
minute I saw you. All right—he's landed."
It was an unusually large shark—"a full nineteen-footer,"
the fisherman
said, as he laid the creature open with his knife.
"Now you rob him, young man, while I step to my hamper
for a fresh bait. There's
generally something in them worth
going for. You've changed my luck, you see. But my
goodness,
I hope you haven't changed your own."
"Oh, it wouldn't matter; don't worry about that. Get
your bait. I'll rob him."
When the fisherman got back the young man had just
finished washing his hands in the
bay, and was starting away.
"What, you are not going?"
"Yes. Good-bye."
"But what about your shark?"
"The shark? Why, what use is he to me?"
"What use is he? I like that. Don't you know that we
can go and
report him to Government, and you'll get a clean
solid eighty shillings bounty? Hard
cash, you know. What
do you think about it now?"
"Oh, well, you can collect it."
"And keep it? Is that what you mean?"
"Yes."
"Well, this is odd. You're one of those sort they call
eccentrics, I judge. The saying
is, you mustn't judge a man
by his clothes, and I'm believing it now. Why yours are looking
just ratty, don't you know; and yet you must be rich."
"I am."
The young man walked slowly back to the town, deeply
musing as he went. He halted a
moment in front of the best
restaurant, then glanced at his clothes and passed on, and
got
his breakfast at a "stand-up." There was a good deal of it,
and it cost five
shillings. He tendered a sovereign, got his
change, glanced at his silver, muttered to
himself, "There isn't
enough to buy clothes with," and went his way.
At half-past nine the richest wool-broker in Sydney was sitting
in his morning-room at home, settling his breakfast with
the morning paper. A
servant put his head in and said:
"There's a sundowner at the door wants to see you, sir."
"What do you bring that kind of a message here for?
Send him about his business."?
"He won't go, sir. I've tried."
"He won't go? That's—why, that's unusual. He's one
of two things, then:
he's a remarkable person, or he's crazy.
Is he crazy?"
"No, sir. He don't look it."
"Then he's remarkable. What does he say he wants?"
"He won't tell, sir; only says it's very important."
"And won't go. Does he say he won't go?"
"Says he'll stand there till he sees you, sir, if it's all day."
"And yet isn't crazy. Show him up."
The sundowner was shown in. The broker said to himself,
"No, he's not crazy; that is
easy to see; so he must be the
other thing."
Then aloud, "Well, my good fellow, be quick about it;
don't waste any words; what is
it you want?"
"I want to borrow a hundred thousand pounds."
"Scott! (It's a mistake; he is crazy.…
No—he
can't be—not with that eye.) Why, you take my
breath
away. Come, who are you?"
"Nobody that you know."
"What is your name?"
"Cecil Rhodes."
"No, I don't remember hearing the name before. Now
then—just for
curiosity's sake—what has sent you to me on
this extraordinary errand?"
"The intention to make a hundred thousand pounds for
you and as much for myself within
the next sixty days."
"Well, well, well. It is the most extraordinary idea that I
—sit down—you interest me. And somehow you—well,
you fascinate me; I think that that is about the word. And it
isn't your
proposition—no, that doesn't fascinate me; it's
something else, I don't quite
know what; something that's
born in you and oozes out of you, I suppose. Now
then—
just for curiosity's sake again, nothing more: as I understand
it, it is your desire to bor—"
"I said intention."
"Pardon, so you did. I thought it was an unheedful use of
the word—an
unheedful valuing of its strength, you know."
"I knew its strength."
"Well, I must say—but look here, let me walk the floor a
little, my mind is
getting into a sort of whirl, though you
don't seem disturbed any. (Plainly this young fellow isn't
crazy; but as
to his being remarkable—well, really he amounts
to that, and something
over.) Now then, I believe I am beyond
the reach of further astonishment. Strike, and spare
not. What is your scheme?"
"To buy the wool crop—deliverable in sixty days."
"What, the whole of it?"
"The whole of it."
"No, I was not quite out of the reach of surprises, after
all. Why, how you talk! Do
you know what our crop is
going to foot up?"
"Two and a half million sterling—maybe a little more."
"Well, you've got your statistics right, any way. Now,
then, do you know what the
margins would foot up, to buy it
at sixty days?"
"The hundred thousand pounds I came here to get."
"Right, once more. Well, dear me, just to see what would
happen, I wish you had the
money. And if you had it, what
would you do with it?"
"I shall make two hundred thousand pounds out of it in
sixty days."
"You mean, of course, that you might make it if—"
"I said 'shall'."
"Yes, by George, you did say 'shall'! You are the most
definite
devil I ever saw, in the matter of language. Dear,
dear, dear, look here! Definite speech means clarity of mind.
Upon my word I believe you've got what you believe to be a
rational reason for venturing into this house, an entire stranger,
on this wild scheme of buying the wool crop of an entire
colony on speculation. Bring it out—I am prepared—acclimatized,
if I may use the word. Why would you buy the
crop, and why would you make that sum out of it? That is to
say, what makes you think you—"
"I don't think—I know."
"Definite again. How do you know?"
"Because France has declared war against Germany, and
wool has gone up fourteen per
cent. in London and is still rising."
"Oh, in-deed? Now then, I've got you! Such a
thunderbolt
as you have just let fly ought to have made me jump out
of my chair, but it didn't
stir me the least little bit, you see.
And for a very simple reason: I have read the
morning
paper. You can look at it if you want to. The fastest ship
in the service
arrived at eleven o'clock last night, fifty days out
from London. All her news is
printed here. There are no
war-clouds anywhere; and as for wool, why, it is the low-spiritedest
commodity in the English market. It is your turn
to jump, now.… Well,
why don't you jump? Why do you
sit there in that placid fashion, when—"
"Because I have later news."
"Later news? Oh, come—later news than fifty days,
brought steaming hot from
London by the—"
"My news is only ten days old."
"Oh, Mun-chausen, hear the maniac talk! Where did you
get it?"
"Got it out of a shark."
"Oh, oh, oh, this is too much! Front! call the police—
bring the gun—raise the town! All the asylums in Christendom
have broken loose in the single person of—"
"GOT IT OUT OF A SHARK."
"Sit down! And collect yourself. Where is the use in
getting excited? Am I excited?
There is nothing to get
excited about. When I make a statement
which I cannot
prove, it will be time enough for you to begin to offer hospitality
to damaging fancies about me and my sanity."
"Oh, a thousand, thousand pardons! I ought to be
ashamed of myself, and I am ashamed of myself for thinking
that a little bit of a
circumstance like sending a shark to England
to fetch back a market report—"
"What does your middle initial stand for, sir?"
"Andrew. What are you writing?"
"Wait a moment. Proof about the shark—and another
matter. Only ten lines.
There—now it is done. Sign it."
"Many thanks—many. Let me see; it says—it says—
oh,
come, this is interesting! Why—why—look here!
prove what you say here, and I'll put up the money, and
double as much, if
necessary, and divide the winnings with
you, half and half. There, now—I've
signed; make your
promise good if you can. Show me a copy of the London
Times only ten days old."
"Here it is—and with it these buttons and a memorandum
book that belonged
to the man the shark swallowed. Swallowed
him in the Thames, without a doubt; for you will notice
that the last entry in the
book is dated 'London,' and is of the
same date as the Times, and
says,
—as clean native German as
anybody can put upon paper, and means
that in consequence
of the declaration of war, this loyal soul is leaving for home
to-day, to fight. And he did leave, too, but the shark had him
before the day was done, poor fellow."
"And a pity, too. But there are times for mourning, and
we will attend to this case
further on; other matters are
pressing, now. I will go down and set the machinery in
motion in a quiet way and buy the crop. It will cheer the
drooping spirits of the boys, in a transitory way. Everything
is transitory in this world. Sixty days hence, when they are
called to deliver the goods, they will think they've been struck
by lightning. But there is a time for mourning, and we will
attend to that case along with the other one. Come along, I'll
take you to my tailor. What did you say your name is?"
"Cecil Rhodes."
"It is hard to remember. However, I think you will make
It easier by and by, if you
live. There are three kinds of people—Commonplace
Men, Remarkable Men, and Lunatics. I'll
classify you with the Remarkables, and
take the chances."
The deal went through, and secured to the young stranger
the first fortune he ever
pocketed.
The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but
for some reason they do not
seem to be. On Saturdays the
young men go out in their boats, and sometimes the water is
fairly covered with the little sails. A boat upsets now and
then, by accident, a
result of tumultuous skylarking; sometimes
the boys upset their boat for fun—such as it is—with
sharks
visibly waiting around for just such an occurrence.
The young fellows scramble aboard
whole—sometimes—not
always. Tragedies have happened more than
once. While I
was in Sydney it was reported that a boy fell out of a boat in
the
mouth of the Paramatta river and screamed for help and
a boy jumped overboard from
another boat to save him from
the assembling sharks; but the sharks made swift work with
the lives of both.
The government pays a bounty for the shark; to get the
bounty the fishermen bait the
hook or the seine with agreeable
mutton; the news spreads and the sharks come from all
over
the Pacific Ocean to get the free board. In time the shark
culture will be
one of the most successful things in the colony.
CHAPTER XIV.
We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our
own is
worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
health had broken down in New York in May; it
had
remained in a doubtful but fairish condition during
a succeeding period of 82 days; it broke again
on the Pacific. It broke again in
Sydney, but not until after
I had had a good outing, and had also filled my lecture engagements.
This latest break lost me the chance of seeing
Queensland. In the circumstances, to go north toward hotter
weather was not
advisable.
So we moved south with a westward slant, 17 hours by rail
to the capital of the colony
of Victoria, Melbourne—that
juvenile city of sixty years, and half a million
inhabitants.
On the map the distance looked small; but that is a trouble
with all
divisions of distance in such a vast country as Australia.
The colony of Victoria itself looks small on the map—
looks like a county, in
fact—yet it is about as large as England,
Scotland, and Wales combined. Or, to get another focus
upon it, it is just 80 times as
large as the state of Rhode Island,
and one-third as large as the State of Texas.
Outside of Melbourne, Victoria seems to be owned by a
handful of squatters, each with
a Rhode Island for a sheep farm.
That is the impression which one gathers from common
talk,
yet the wool industry of Victoria is by no means so great as
that of New
South Wales. The climate of Victoria is favorable
to other great industries—among others, wheat-growing
and the making of
wine.
We took the train at Sydney at about four in the afternoon.
It was American in one
way, for we had a most rational sleeping
car; also the car was clean and fine and new—nothing
about it to
suggest the rolling stock of the continent of Europe.
But our baggage was weighed, and
extra weight charged for.
That was continental. Continental and troublesome. Any
detail of railroading that is not troublesome cannot honorably
be described as
continental.
The tickets were round-trip ones—to Melbourne, and clear
to Adelaide in
South Australia, and then all the way back
to Sydney. Twelve hundred more miles than we
really expected
to make; but then as the round trip wouldn't cost much
more than the single trip,
it seemed well enough to buy as
many miles as one could afford, even if one was not
likely to
need them. A human being has a natural desire to have more
of a good
thing than he needs.
THE ODDEST THING IN AUSTRALASIA.
Now comes a singular thing: the oddest thing, the strangest
thing, the most baffling
and unaccountable marvel that Australasia
can show. At the frontier between New South Wales
and Victoria our multitude of
passengers were routed out of
their snug beds by lantern-light in the morning in the
biting
cold of a high altitude to change cars on a road that has no
break in it from Sydney to Melbourne! Think of the paralysis
of intellect that gave that idea birth; imagine the boulder
it emerged from on some petrified legislator's shoulders.
It is a narrow-gauge road to the frontier, and a broader
gauge thence to Melbourne.
The two governments were the
builders of the road and are the owners of it. One or two
reasons are given for this curious state of things. One is, that
it represents the
jealousy existing between the colonies—
the two most important colonies of
Australasia. What the
other one is, I have forgotten. But it is of no consequence.
It could be but another effort to explain the inexplicable.
All passengers fret at the double-gauge; all shippers of
freight must of course fret
at it; unnecessary expense, delay,
and annoyance are imposed upon everybody concerned,
and no
one is benefited.
Each Australian colony fences itself off from its neighbor
with a custom-house.
Personally, I have no objection, but it
must be a good deal of inconvenience to the
people. We have
something resembling it here and there in America, but it goes
by
another name. The large empire of the Pacific coast requires
a world of iron machinery,
and could manufacture it economically
on the spot if the imposts on foreign iron were removed.
But they are not.
Protection to Pennsylvania and Alabama
forbids it. The result to the Pacific coast is
the same as if
there were several rows of custom-fences between the coast
and the
East. Iron carted across the American continent at
luxurious railway rates would be
valuable enough to be coined
when it arrived.
We changed cars. This was at Albury. And it was there,
I think, that the growing day
and the early sun exposed the
distant range called the Blue Mountains. Accurately named.
"My word!" as the Australians say, but it was a stunning
color, that blue. Deep, strong, rich, exquisite; towering and
majestic masses of blue—a softly luminous blue, a smouldering
blue, as if vaguely lit by fires within. It extinguished the blue
of the sky—made it pallid and unwholesome, whitey and
washed-out. A wonderful color—just divine.
A resident told me that those were not mountains; he said
they were rabbit-piles. And
explained that long exposure and
the over-ripe condition of the rabbits was what made
them
look so blue. This man may have been right, but much reading
of books of travel has made me distrustful of gratis information
furnished by unofficial residents of a country. The
facts which such people give
to travelers are usually erroneous,
and often intemperately so. The rabbit-plague has
indeed
been very bad in Australia, and it could account for one mountain,
but not for a mountain range, it seems to me. It is too
large an
order.
We breakfasted at the station. A good breakfast, except
the coffee; and cheap. The
Government establishes the prices
and placards them. The waiters were men, I think; but
that
is not usual in Australasia. The usual thing is to have girls.
No, not girls,
young ladies—generally duchesses. Dress?
They would attract attention at any
royal levée in Europe.
Even empresses and queens do not dress as they do. Not
that
they could not afford it, perhaps, but they would not know how.
All the pleasant morning we slid smoothly along over the
plains, through
thin—not thick—forests of great melancholy
gum trees, with trunks
rugged with curled sheets of flaking bark
—erysipelas convalescents, so to
speak, shedding their dead
skins. And all along were tiny cabins, built sometimes of
wood, sometimes of gray-blue corrugated iron; and the doorsteps
and fences were clogged with children—rugged little
simply-clad chaps
that looked as if they had been imported
from the banks of the Mississippi without
breaking bulk.
And there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded
with showy advertisements—mainly of almost too
self-righteous brands of "sheep-dip." If that is the name—
and I think
it is. It is a stuff like tar, and is dabbed on to
places where the shearer clips a
piece out of the sheep. It
bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip to
it
which makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills.
It is not good
to eat. That is, it is not good to eat except
when mixed with railroad coffee. It
improves railroad coffee.
Without it railroad coffee is too vague. But with it, it is
quite
assertive and enthusiastic. By itself, railroad coffee is too passive;
but sheep-dip makes it wake up and get down to
business.
I wonder where they get railroad coffee?
THINGS NOT SEEN.
We saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an
ornithorhyncus, not a lecturer,
not a native. Indeed, the land
seemed quite destitute of game. But I have misused the
word
native. In Australia it is applied to Australian-born whites
only. I should
have said that we saw no Aboriginals—no
"blackfellows." And to this day I
have never seen one. In
the great museums you will find all the other curiosities, but
in
the curio of chiefest interest to the stranger all of them are
lacking. We have
at home an abundance of museums, and
not an American Indian in them. It is clearly an
absurdity,
but it never struck me before.
CHAPTER XV.
Truth is stranger than fiction—to some people, but I am measurably familiar
with it.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to
possibilities; Truth isn't.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
air was balmy and delicious, the sunshine radiant;
it
was a charming excursion. In the course of it we
came to a town whose odd name was
famous all over
the world a quarter of a century ago—Wagga-Wagga. This
was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop
there. It was out of the
midst of his humble collection of
sausages and tripe that he soared up into the zenith
of notoriety
and hung there in the wastes of space a time, with the telescopes
of all nations leveled at him in unappeasable curiosity—
curiosity as
to which of the two long-missing persons he was:
Arthur Orton, the mislaid roustabout of
Wapping, or Sir Roger
Tichborne, the lost heir of a name and estates as old as English
history. We all know now, but not a dozen people knew then;
and the dozen kept the
mystery to themselves and allowed the
most intricate and fascinating and marvelous
real-life romance
that has ever been played upon the world's stage to unfold itself
serenely, act by act, in a British court by the long and
laborious processes of
judicial development.
When we recall the details of that great romance we marvel
to see what daring chances truth may freely take in constructing
a tale, as compared with the poor little conservative
risks permitted to fiction.
The fiction-artist could achieve no
success with the materials of this splendid
Tichborne romance.
He would have to drop out the chief characters; the public
would say such people are impossible. He would have to drop
out a number of the most picturesque incidents; the public
would say such things could never happen. And yet the chief
characters did exist, and the incidents did happen.
It cost the Tichborne estates $400,000 to unmask the Claimant
and drive him out; and even after the exposure multitudes
of Englishmen still
believed in him. It cost the British Government
another $400,000 to convict him of perjury; and after
the conviction the same old
multitudes still believed in him; and
among these believers were many educated and
intelligent men;
and some of them had personally known the real Sir Roger.
The
Claimant was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. When
he got out of prison he went to
New York and kept a whisky
saloon in the Bowery for a time, then disappeared from view.
He always claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne until death
called for him. This was but a
few months ago—not very
much short of a generation since he left Wagga-Wagga
to go
and possess himself of his estates. On his death-bed he yielded
up his
secret, and confessed in writing that he was only Arthur
Orton of Wapping, able seaman
and butcher—that and nothing
more. But it is scarcely to be doubted that there are
people whom even his dying
confession will not convince. The
old habit of assimilating incredibilities must have
made strong
food a necessity in their case; a weaker article would probably
disagree with them.
I was in London when the Claimant stood his trial for perjury.
I attended one of his showy evenings in the sumptuous
quarters provided for him
from the purses of his adherents and
well-wishers. He was in evening dress, and I
thought him a
rather fine and stately creature. There were about twenty-five
gentlemen present; educated men, men moving in good
society, none of them
commonplace; some of them were men
of distinction, none of them were obscurities. They were his
cordial friends and admirers. It was "S'r Roger," always
"S'r Roger," on all hands; no one withheld the title, all turned
it from the tongue with unction, and as if it tasted good.
For many years I had had a mystery in stock. Melbourne,
and only Melbourne, could
unriddle it for me. In 1873 I
arrived in London with my wife and young child, and
presently
received a note from Naples signed by a name not familiar to
me. It was
not Bascom, and it was not Henry; but I will
call it Henry Bascom for convenience's
sake. This note, of
about six lines, was written on a strip of white paper whose
end-edges were ragged. I came to be familiar with those
strips in later years. Their
size and pattern were always the
same. Their contents were usually to the same effect:
would
I and mine come to the writer's country-place in England on
such and such a
date, by such and such a train, and stay twelve
days and depart by such and such a train
at the end of the
specified time? A carriage would meet us at the station.
These invitations were always for a long time ahead; if we
were in Europe, three
months ahead; if we were in America,
six to twelve months ahead. They always named the
exact
date and train for the beginning and also for the end of the
visit.
This first note invited us for a date three months in the
future. It asked us to
arrive by the 4.10 p. m. train from London,
August 6th. The
carriage would be waiting. The carriage
would take us away seven days later—train specified.
And there were
these words: "Speak to Tom Hughes."
I showed the note to the author of "Tom Brown at
Rugby," and he said:—
"Accept, and be thankful."
He described Mr. Bascom as being a man of genius, a man
of fine attainments, a choice
man in every way, a rare and
beautiful character. He said that Bascom Hall was a particularly
fine example of the stately manorial mansion of Elizabeth's
days, and that it was a house worth going a long way
to see—like Knowle; that Mr. B. was of a social disposition,
liked the company of agreeable people, and always had samples
of the sort coming and going.
We paid the visit. We paid others, in later years—the last
one in 1879.
Soon after that Mr. Bascom started on a voyage
around the world in a steam
yacht—a long and leisurely trip,
for he was making collections, in all lands,
of birds, butterflies,
and such things.
The day that President Garfield was shot by the assassin
Guiteau, we were at a little
watering place on Long Island
Sound; and in the mail matter of that day came a letter
with
the Melbourne post-mark on it. It was for my wife, but I
recognized Mr.
Bascom's handwriting on the envelope, and
opened it. It was the usual note—as
to paucity of lines
—and was written on the customary strip of paper; but
there
was nothing usual about the contents. The note informed my
wife that if it
would be any assuagement of her grief to know
that her husband's lecture-tour in
Australia was a satisfactory
venture from the beginning to the end, he, the writer,
could
testify that such was the case; also, that her husband's untimely
death had been mourned by all classes, as she would
already know by the press
telegrams, long before the reception
of this note; that the funeral was attended by the
officials of
the colonial and city governments; and that while he, the
writer, her
friend and mine, had not reached Melbourne in time
to see the body, he had at least had
the sad privilege of acting
as one of the pall-bearers. Signed, "Henry Bascom."
My first thought was, why didn't he have the coffin opened?
He would have seen that
the corpse was an imposter, and he
could have gone right ahead and dried up the most of
those
tears, and comforted those sorrowing governments, and sold the
remains and sent me the money.
I did nothing about the matter. I had set the law after
living lecture-doubles of mine
a couple of times in America,
and the law had not been able to catch them; others in my
trade had tried to catch their impostor-doubles and had failed.
Then where was the use in harrying a ghost? None—and so
I did not
disturb it. I had a curiosity to know about that
man's lecture-tour and last moments,
but that could wait.
When I should see Mr. Bascom he would tell me all about it.
But he passed from life, and I never saw him again. My
curiosity faded away.
However, when I found that I was going to Australia it revived.
And naturally: for if the people should say that I was
a dull, poor thing compared
to what I was before I died, it
would have a bad effect on business. Well, to my
surprise the
Sydney journalists had never heard of that impostor!
I
pressed them, but they were firm—they had never heard of
him, and
didn't believe in him.
I could not understand it; still, I thought it would all
come right in Melbourne. The
government would remember;
and the other mourners. At the supper of the Institute of
Journalists I should find out all about the matter. But no—
it turned
out that they had never heard of it.
So my mystery was a mystery still. It was a great disappointment.
I believed it would never be cleared up—in this
life—so I dropped it out of my mind.
But at last! just when I was least expecting it—
However, this is not the place for the rest of it; I shall
come to the matter again,
in a far-distant chapter.
CHAPTER XVI.
There is a Moral Sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that
the
Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the
Immoral
Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
spreads around over an immense area of
ground. It
is a stately city architecturally as well
as in magnitude. It has an elaborate system of
cable-car service; it has museums, and colleges, and schools,
and public gardens,
and electricity, and gas, and libraries, and
theaters, and mining centers, and wool
centers, and centers of
the arts and sciences, and boards of trade, and ships, and railroads,
and a harbor, and social clubs, and journalistic
clubs,
and racing clubs, and a squatter club sumptuously housed and
appointed, and
as many churches and banks as can make a
living. In a word, it is equipped with
everything that goes to
make the modern great city. It is the largest city of Australasia,
and fills the post with honor and credit. It
has one specialty;
this must not be jumbled in with those
other things.
It is the mitred Metropolitan of the Horse-Racing Cult. Its
raceground is the Mecca of Australasia. On the great annual
day of
sacrifice—the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes's Day—
business is
suspended over a stretch of land and sea as wide as
from New York to San Francisco, and
deeper than from the
northern lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and every man and
woman, of high degree or low, who can afford the expense,
put away their other duties
and come. They begin to swarm
in by ship and rail a fortnight before the day, and they
swarm
thicker and thicker day, after day, until all the vehicles of
transportation are taxed to their uttermost to meet the demands
of the occasion, and all hotels and lodgings are bulging
outward because of the pressure from within. They come a
hundred thousand strong, as all the best authorities say, and
they pack the spacious grounds and grand-stands and make a
spectacle such as is never to be seen in Australasia elsewhere.
It is the "Melbourne Cup" that brings this multitude
together. Their clothes have been
ordered long ago, at unlimited
cost, and without bounds as to beauty and magnificence,
and have been kept in
concealment until now, for unto this
day are they consecrate. I am speaking of the ladies' clothes;
but one might know that.
And so the grand-stands make a brilliant and wonderful
spectacle, a delirium of color,
a vision of beauty. The champagne
flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy; everybody
bets, and gloves and fortunes change hands right along,
all the time. Day after
day the races go on, and the fun and
the excitement are kept at white heat; and when
each day is
done, the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race
in the
morning. And at the end of the great week the swarms
secure lodgings and transportation
for next year, then flock
away to their remote homes and count their gains and losses,
and order next year's Cup-clothes, and then lie down and sleep
two weeks, and get
up sorry to reflect that a whole year must
be put in somehow or other before they can be
wholly happy
again.
The Melbourne Cup is the Australasian National Day. It
would be difficult to overstate
its importance. It overshadows
all other holidays and specialized days of whatever sort
in that
congeries of colonies. Overshadows them? I might almost
say it blots them
out. Each of them gets attention, but not
everybody's; each of them evokes interest, but
not everybody's;
each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not
everybody's;
in each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is
a matter of habit and custom, and another part of it is official
and perfunctory. Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an
attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal
—and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup Day is supreme—
it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual day,
in any country, which can be named by that large name—
Supreme. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any
country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration
of conversation and preparation and anticipation and
jubilation. No day save this one; but this one does it.
In America we have no annual supreme day; no day whose
approach makes the whole nation
glad. We have the Fourth
of July, and Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Neither of them
can claim the primacy; neither of them can arouse an enthusiasm
which comes near to being universal. Eight grown
Americans out of ten dread the
coming of the Fourth, with its
pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is
gone
—if still alive. The approach of Christmas brings harrassment
and dread to many excellent people. They have to buy
a cart-load of presents, and
they never know what to buy to
hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard
and
anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so
dissatisfied with
the result, and so disappointed that they want
to sit down and cry. Then they give
thanks that Christmas
comes but once a year. The observance of Thanksgiving Day
—as a function—has become general of late years. The
Thankfulness
is not so general. This is natural. Two-thirds
of the nation have always had hard luck
and a hard time
during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm.
We have a supreme day—a sweeping and tremendous and
tumultuous day, a day which commands an absolute universality
of interest and excitement; but it is not annual. It
comes but once in four years; therefore it cannot count as a
rival of the Melbourne Cup.
In Great Britain and Ireland they have two great days—
Christmas and the
Queen's birthday. But they are equally
popular; there is no supremacy.
I think it must be conceded that the position of the Australasian
Day is unique, solitary, unfellowed; and likely to
hold that high place a long
time.
The next things which interest us when we travel are, first,
the people; next, the
novelties; and finally the history of the
places and countries visited. Novelties are
rare in cities which
represent the most advanced civilization of the modern day.
When one is familiar with such cities in the other parts of the
world he is in effect
familiar with the cities of Australasia. The
outside aspects will furnish little that is
new. There will be
new names, but the things which they represent will sometimes
be found to be less new than their names. There may
be shades of difference, but
these can easily be too fine for
detection by the incompetent eye of the passing
stranger. In
the larrikin he will not be able to discover a new species, but
only
an old one met elsewhere, and variously called loafer,
rough, tough, bummer, or
blatherskite, according to his geographical
distribution. The larrikin differs by a shade from
those others, in that he is
more sociable toward the stranger
than they, more kindly disposed, more hospitable, more
hearty,
more friendly. At least it seemed so to me, and I had opportunity
to observe. In Sydney, at least. In Melbourne I
had to drive to and from the
lecture-theater, but in Sydney I
was able to walk both ways, and did it. Every night, on
my
way home at ten, or a quarter past, I found the larrikin grouped
in
considerable force at several of the street corners, and he
always gave me this pleasant
salutation:
"HELLO, MARK!"
"Hello, Mark!"
"Here's to you, old chap!"
"Say—Mark!—is he dead?—a reference to a passage in
some book of mine, though I did not detect, at that time, that
that was its source. And
I didn't detect it afterward in Melbourne,
when I came on
the stage for the first time, and the
same question was dropped down upon me from the
dizzy
height of the gallery. It is always difficult to answer a sudden
inquiry like that, when you have come unprepared and
don't know what it means. I
will remark here—if it is not
an indecorum—that the welcome which
an American lecturer
gets from a British colonial audience is a thing which will
move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his
voice. And from Winnipeg
to Africa, experience will teach
him nothing; he will never learn to expect it, it will
catch him
as a surprise each time. The war-cloud hanging black over
England and
America made no trouble for me. I was a
prospective prisoner of war, but at dinners,
suppers, on the
platform, and elsewhere, there was never anything to remind
me of
it. This was hospitality of the right metal, and would
have been prominently lacking in
some countries, in the circumstances.
And speaking of the war-flurry, it seemed to me to bring
to light the unexpected, in a
detail or two. It seemed to relegate
the war-talk to the politicians on both sides of the water;
whereas whenever a
prospective war between two nations had
been in the air theretofore, the public had done
most of the
talking and the bitterest. The attitude of the newspapers was
new
also. I speak of those of Australasia and India, for I
had access to those only. They
treated the subject argumentatively
and with dignity, not with spite and anger. That was
a new spirit, too, and not
learned of the French and German
press, either before Sedan or since. I heard many
public
speeches, and they reflected the moderation of the journals.
The outlook is that the English-speaking race will dominate
the earth a hundred years from now, if its sections do not get
to fighting each other. It would be a pity to spoil that prospect
by baffling and retarding wars when arbitration would
settle their differences so much better and also so much more
definitely.
No, as I have suggested, novelties are rare in the great capitals
of modern times. Even the wool exchange in Melbourne
could not be told from the
familiar stock exchange of other
countries. Wool brokers are just like stockbrokers;
they all
bounce from their seats and put up their hands and yell in
unison—no stranger can tell what—and the president calmly
says—"Sold to Smith & Co., threppence
farthing—next!"—
when probably nothing of the kind happened; for
how should
he know?
In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and
fascinating things; but all
museums are fascinating, and they
do so tire your eyes, and break your back, and burn
out your
vitalities with their consuming interest. You always say you
will never
go again, but you do go. The palaces of the rich,
in Melbourne, are much like the
palaces of the rich in America,
and the life in them is the same; but there the
resemblance
ends. The grounds surrounding the American palace are not
often large,
and not often beautiful, but in the Melbourne case
the grounds are often ducally
spacious, and the climate and
the gardeners together make them as beautiful as a dream.
It
is said that some of the country seats have grounds—domains
—about them which rival in charm and magnitude those which
surround the
country mansion of an English lord; but I was
not out in the country; I had my hands
full in town.
And what was the origin of this majestic city and its
efflorescence of palatial town
houses and country seats? Its
first brick was laid and its first house built by a passing convict.
Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it
is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the
country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into
second and third place. It does not read like history, but like
the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy
old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and
incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they
are all true, they all happened.
SUNRISE BLUE MOUNTAINS.
CHAPTER XVII.
The English are mentioned in the Bible: Blessed are the meek, for they shall
inherit
the earth.
—Puddn'head Wilson's New Calendar.
we consider the immensity of the British Empire
in
territory, population, and trade, it requires a stern
exercise of faith to believe in
the figures which
represent Australasia's contribution to the Empire's commercial
grandeur. As compared with the landed estate of the British
Empire, the landed estate
dominated by any other Power
except one—Russia—is not very
impressive for size. My
authorities make the British Empire not much short of a
fourth larger than the Russian Empire. Roughly proportioned,
if you will allow your entire hand to represent
the British Empire, you may then
cut off the fingers a trifle
above the middle joint of the middle finger, and what is
left
of the hand will represent Russia. The populations ruled by
Great Britain and
China are about the same—400,000,000
each. No other Power approaches these
figures. Even
Russia is left far behind.
The population of Australasia—4,000,000—sinks into
nothingness,
and is lost from sight in that British ocean of
400,000,000. Yet the statistics indicate
that it rises again and
shows up very conspicuously when its share of the Empire's
commerce is the matter under consideration. The value of
England's annual exports and
imports is stated at three
billions of dollars,*
New South Wales Blue Book.
and it is claimed that more than one-tenthof this great aggregate is represented by Australasia's exports
British Empire: Area, 11,340,800 Square miles
Russian Empire: Area, 8,660,282 Square miles
to England and imports from England.*
D. M. Luckie.
In addition to this,Australasia does a trade with countries other than England,
amounting to a hundred million dollars a year, and a domestic
intercolonial trade amounting to a hundred and fifty millions.*
D. M. Luckie.
In round numbers the 4,000,000 buy and sell about $600,000,000
worth of goods a year. It is claimed that about half
of this represents
commodities of Australasian production.
The products exported annually by India are
worth a trifle over
$500,000,000.†
New South Wales Blue Book.
Now, here are some faith-straining figures:Indian production (300,000,000 population), $500,000,000.
Australasian production (4,000,000 population), $300,000,000.
That is to say, the product of the individual Indian,
annually (for export
some whither), is worth $1.75: that of the
individual Australasian
(for export some whither), $75! Or,
to put it in another way, the
Indian family of man and wife
and three children sends away an annual result worth
$8.75,
while the Australasian family sends away $375 worth.
There are trustworthy statistics furnished by Sir Richard
Temple and others, which
show that the individual Indian's
whole annual product, both for export and home use, is
worth
in gold only $7.50; or, $37.50 for the family-aggregate.
Ciphered out on a
like ratio of multiplication, the Australasian
family's aggregate production would be
nearly $1,600. Truly,
nothing is so astonishing as figures, if they once get started.
We left Melbourne by rail for Adelaide, the capital of the
vast Province of South
Australia a seventeen-hour excursion.
On the train we
found several Sydney friends; among
them a Judge who was going out on circuit, and was
going to
hold court at Broken Hill, where the celebrated silver mine is.
It seemed
a curious road to take to get to that region. Broken
Hill is close to the western border
of New South Wales, and
Sydney is on the eastern border. A fairly straight line, 700
miles long, drawn westward from Sydney, would strike Broken
Hill, just as a somewhat shorter one drawn west from Boston
would strike Buffalo. The way the Judge was traveling would
carry him over 2,000 miles by rail, he said; southwest from
Sydney down to Melbourne, then northward up to Adelaide,
then a cant back northeastward and over the border into New
South Wales once more—to Broken Hill. It was like going
from Boston southwest to Richmond, Virginia, then northwest
up to Erie, Pennsylvania, then a cant back northeast and over
the border—to Buffalo, New York.
But the explanation was simple. Years ago the fabulously
rich silver discovery at
Broken Hill burst suddenly upon an
unexpectant world. Its stocks started at shillings,
and went
by leaps and bounds to the most fanciful figures. It was one of
those
cases where the cook puts a month's wages into shares,
and comes next month and buys
your house at your own
price, and moves into it herself; where the coachman takes a
few shares, and next month sets up a bank; and where the
common sailor invests the
price of a spree, and next month
buys out the steamship company and goes into business
on
his own hook. In a word, it was one of those excitements
which bring multitudes
of people to a common center with a
rush, and whose needs must be supplied, and at once.
Adelaide
was close by, Sydney was far away. Adelaide threw a short
railway across
the border before Sydney had time to arrange
for a long one; it was not worth while for
Sydney to arrange
at all. The whole vast trade-profit of Broken Hill fell into
Adelaide's hands, irrevocably. New South Wales furnishes
law for Broken Hill and sends
her Judges 2,000 miles—mainly
through alien countries—to
administer it, but Adelaide takes
the dividends and makes no moan.
We started at 4.20 in the afternoon, and moved across level
plains until night. In the
morning we had a stretch of
"scrub" country—the kind of thing which is so useful to the
Australian novelist. In the scrub the hostile aboriginal lurks,
and flits mysteriously about, slipping out from time to time
to surprise and slaughter the settler; then slipping back again,
and leaving no track that the white man can follow. In the
scrub the novelist's heroine gets lost, search fails of result;
she wanders here and there, and finally sinks down exhausted
and unconscious, and the searchers pass within a yard or two
of her, not suspecting that she is near, and by and by some
rambler finds her bones and the pathetic diary which she had
scribbled with her failing hand and left behind. Nobody can
find a lost heroine in the scrub but the aboriginal "tracker,"
and he will not lend himself to the scheme if it will interfere
with the novelist's plot. The scrub stretches miles and miles
in all directions, and looks like a level roof of bush-tops without
a break or a crack in it—as seamless as a blanket, to all
appearance. One might as well walk under water and hope
to guess out a route and stick to it, I should think. Yet it is
claimed that the aboriginal "tracker" was able to hunt out
people lost in the scrub. Also in the "bush"; also in the
desert; and even follow them over patches of bare rocks and
over alluvial ground which had to all appearance been washed
clear of footprints.
From reading Australian books and talking with the people,
I became convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances
evince a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a
minuteness and accuracy
of observation in the matter of detective-work
not found in nearly so remarkable a degree in
any other people, white or colored.
In an official account of
the blacks of Australia published by the government of Victoria,
one reads that the aboriginal not only notices the
faint
marks left on the bark of a tree by the claws of a climbing
opossum, but knows in some way or other whether the marks
were made to-day or yesterday.
A TEST CASE.
And there is the case, on record, where A., a settler, makes
a bet with B., that B.
may lose a cow as effectually as he can,
and A. will produce an aboriginal who will find
her. B.
selects a cow and lets the tracker see the
cow's footprint, then be put
under guard. B.
then drives the cow a few miles over a course
which drifts in all
directions, and frequently
doubles back upon itself; and he selects difficult
ground all the time, and once or twice
even drives the cow through herds of other
cows, and mingles her tracks in the wide
confusion of theirs. He finally brings
his
cow home; the aboriginal is set at liberty,
and at once moves around in a
great circle,
examining all cow-tracks until he finds the
one he is after; then
sets off and follows it
throughout its erratic
course, and ultimately
tracks
it to the stable
where B. has hidden the
cow. Now wherein
does one cow-track
differ
from another? There
must be a difference, or
the tracker could not have
performed the feat; a difference
minute, shadowy, and not detectible by you or me, or
by the late Sherlock Holmes,
and yet discernible by a member
of a race charged by some people with occupying the
bottom place in the gradations
of human intelligence.
CHAPTER XVIII.
It is easier to stay out than get out. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
train was now exploring a beautiful hill country,
and
went twisting in and out through lovely little
green valleys. There were several
varieties of gumtrees;
among them many giants. Some of them
were bodied
and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect,
and
reminded one of the quaint apple trees in Japanese pictures.
And there was one peculiarly beautiful tree whose name
and breed I did not know.
The foliage seemed to consist of
big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half of each
bunch a rich
brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid and
strenuous
and shouting green. The effect was altogether bewitching.
The tree was apparently rare. I should say that
the first and last samples of it seen by
us were not more than
half an hour apart. There was another tree of striking aspect,
a kind of pine, we were told. Its foliage was as fine as hair,
apparently, and its
mass sphered itself above the naked
straight stem like an explosion of misty smoke. It
was not a
sociable sort; it did not gather in groups or couples, but each
individual stood far away from its nearest neighbor. It scattered
itself in this spacious and exclusive fashion about the
slopes of swelling grassy
great knolls, and stood in the full
flood of the wonderful sunshine; and as far as you
could see
the tree itself you could also see the ink-black blot of its
shadow on
the shining green carpet at its feet.
On some part of this railway journey we saw gorse and
broom—importations from England—and a gentleman who
came into our compartment on a visit tried to tell me which
was which; but as he didn't know, he had difficulty. He said
he was ashamed of his ignorance, but that he had never been
confronted with the question before during the fifty years and
more that he had spent in Australia, and so he had never happened
to get interested in the matter. But there was no need
to be ashamed. The most of us have his defect. We take a
natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an
interest in familiar things. The gorse and the broom were a
fine accent in the landscape. Here and there they burst out in
sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of
sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a
body catch his breath with the happy surprise of it. And
then there was the wattle, a native bush or tree, an inspiring
cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom. It is a favorite with the
Australians, and has a fine fragrance, a quality usually wanting
in Australian blossoms.
The gentleman who enriched me with the poverty of his
information about the gorse and
the broom told me that he
came out from England a youth of twenty and entered the
Province of South Australia with thirty-six shillings in his
pocket—an
adventurer without trade, profession, or friends,
but with a clearly-defined purpose in
his head: he would stay
until he was worth £200, then go back home. He would
allow
himself five years for the accumulation of this fortune.
"That was more than fifty years ago," said he. "And here
I am, yet."
As he went out at the door he met a friend, and turned and
introduced him to me, and
the friend and I had a talk and a
smoke. I spoke of the previous conversation and said
there
was something very pathetic about this half century of exile,
and that I
wished the £200 scheme had succeeded.
"With him? Oh, it did. It's not so sad a case. He is modest,
and he left out some of the particulars. The lad reached
South Australia just in time to help discover the Burra-Burra
copper mines. They
turned out £700,000 in the first three
years. Up to now they have yielded
£20,000,000. He has had
his share. Before that boy had been in the country
two years
he could have gone home and bought a village; he could go
now and buy a
city, I think. No,
there is nothing very pathetic about
his case. He and his
copper arrived
at just a handy time to save South
Australia. It had got mashed
pretty
flat under the collapse of a
land boom a while before."
"HERE I AM YET".
There it is again; picturesque
history—Australia's
specialty. In 1829 South Australia
hadn't a
white man in it. In 1836
the British Parliament erected it—still
a
solitude—into a Province, and gave
it a governor and other governmental
machinery. Speculators took hold, now,
and inaugurated a vast land scheme,
and
invited immigration, encouraging
it with lurid promises of sudden wealth. It was well
worked
in London; and bishops, statesmen, and all sorts of people made
a rush for
the land company's shares. Immigrants soon began
to pour into the region of Adelaide and
select town lots and
farms in the sand and the mangrove swamps by the sea. The
crowds continued to come, prices of land rose high, then higher
and still higher,
everybody was prosperous and happy, the
boom swelled into gigantic proportions. A
village of sheet-iron
huts and clapboard sheds sprang up in the sand, and in
these wigwams fashion made display; richly-dressed ladies
played on costly pianos, London swells in evening dress and
patent-leather boots were abundant, and this fine society drank
champagne, and in other ways conducted itself in this capital
of humble sheds as it had been accustomed to do in the aristocratic
quarters of the metropolis of the world. The provincial
government put up expensive buildings for its own use, and a
palace with gardens for the use of its governor. The governor
had a guard, and maintained a court. Roads, wharves, and
hospitals were built. All this on credit, on paper, on wind, on
inflated and fictitious values—on the boom's moonshine, in fact.
This went on handsomely during four or five years. Then
all of a sudden came a smash.
Bills for a huge amount drawn
by the governor upon the Treasury were dishonored, the
land
company's credit went up in smoke, a panic followed, values
fell with a rush,
the frightened immigrants seized their grip-sacks
and fled to other lands, leaving behind them a good imitation
of a solitude, where lately had been a buzzing and
populous hive of men.
Adelaide was indeed almost empty; its population had
fallen to 3,000. During two years
or more the death-trance
continued. Prospect of revival there was none; hope of it
ceased. Then, as suddenly as the paralysis had come, came the
resurrection from it.
Those astonishingly rich copper mines
were discovered, and the corpse got up and danced.
The wool production began to grow; grain-raising followed
—followed so
vigorously, too, that four or five years after the
copper discovery, this little colony,
which had had to import
its breadstuffs formerly, and pay hard prices for
them—once
$50 a barrel for flour—had become an exporter of grain.
The prosperities continued. After many years Providence, desiring
to show especial regard for New South Wales and exhibit
a loving interest in its welfare which should certify to all
nations the recognition of that colony's conspicuous righteousness
and distinguished well-deserving, conferred upon it that
treasury of inconceivable riches, Broken Hill; and South
Australia went over the border and took it, giving thanks.
Among our passengers was an American with a unique
vocation. Unique is a strong word,
but I use it justifiably if I
did not misconceive what the American told me; for I understood
him to say that in the world there was not another man
engaged in the business
which he was following. He was buying
the kangaroo-skin crop; buying all of it, both the Australian
crop and the Tasmanian; and buying it for an American
house in New York. The
prices were not high, as there was
no competition, but the year's aggregate of skins
would cost
him £30,000. I had had the idea that the kangaroo was about
extinct in Tasmania and well thinned out on the continent.
In America the skins are
tanned and made into shoes. After
the tanning, the leather takes a new
name—which I have forgotten—I
only remember that the new name does not indicate
that the kangaroo furnishes the
leather. There was a German
competition for a while, some years ago, but that has
ceased.
The Germans failed to arrive at the secret of tanning the skins
successfully, and they withdrew from the business. Now then,
I suppose that I have seen
a man whose occupation is really entitled
to bear that high epithet—unique. And I suppose that
there is not
another occupation in the world that is restricted
to the hands of a sole person. I can
think of no instance of it.
There is more than one Pope, there is more than one Emperor,
there is even more than one living god, walking upon the earth
and worshiped in
all sincerity by large populations of men.
I have seen and talked with two of these
Beings myself in
India, and I have the autograph of one of them. It can come
good,
by and by, I reckon, if I attach it to a "permit."
Approaching Adelaide we dismounted from the train, as
the French say, and were driven in an open carriage over the
hills and along their slopes to the city. It was an excursion of
an hour or two, and the charm of it could not be overstated, I
think. The road wound around gaps and gorges, and offered
all varieties of scenery and prospect—mountains, crags,
country homes, gardens, forests—color, color, color everywhere,
and the air fine and fresh, the skies blue, and not a
shred of cloud to mar the downpour of the brilliant sunshine.
And finally the mountain gateway opened, and the immense
plain lay spread out below and stretching away into dim distances
on every hand, soft and delicate and dainty and beautiful.
On its near edge reposed the city.
We descended and entered. There was nothing to remind
one of the humble capital of
huts and sheds of the long-vanished
day of the land-boom. No, this was a modern city, with
wide streets, compactly
built; with fine homes everywhere,
embowered in foliage and flowers, and with imposing
masses of
public buildings nobly grouped and architecturally beautiful.
There was prosperity in the air; for another boom was on.
Providence, desiring to show
especial regard for the neighboring
colony on the west—called Western Australia—and exhibit
a loving interest in its welfare which should certify to all
nations the
recognition of that colony's conspicuous righteousness
and distinguished well-deserving, had recently conferred
upon it that majestic
treasury of golden riches, Coolgardie;
and now South Australia had gone around the
corner and
taken it, giving thanks. Everything comes to him who is
patient and
good, and waits.
But South Australia deserves much, for apparently she is a
hospitable home for every
alien who chooses to come; and for
his religion, too. She has a population, as per the
latest census,
of only 320,000-odd, and yet her varieties of religion indicate
the
presence within her borders of samples of people from
pretty nearly every part of the globe you can think of. Tabulated,
these varieties of religion make a remarkable show. One
would have to go far to find its match. I copy here this cosmopolitan
curiosity, and it comes from the published census:Church of England,89,271Roman Catholic,47,179Wesleyan,49,159Lutheran,23,328Presbyterian,18,206Congregationalist,11,882Bible Christian,15,762Primitive Methodist,11,654Baptist,17,547Christian Brethren,465Methodist New Connexion,39Unitarian,688Church of Christ,3,367Society of Friends,100Salvation Army,4,356New Jerusalem Church,168Jews,840Protestants (undefined),5,532Mohammedans,299Confucians, etc.,3,884Other religions,1,719Object,6,940Not stated,8,046Total,320,431
The item in the above list "Other religions" includes the
following as returned:
About 64 roads to the other world. You see how healthy the
religious atmosphere is.
Anything can live in it. Agnostics,
Atheists, Freethinkers, Infidels, Mormons, Pagans,
Indefinites:
they are all there. And all the big sects of the world can do
more
than merely live in it: they can spread, flourish, prosper.
All except the Spiritualists
and the Theosophists. That is the
most curious feature of this curious table. What is
the matter
with the specter? Why do they puff him away? He is a
welcome toy
everywhere else in the world.
"NOT WANTED HERE."
CHAPTER XIX.
Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove
marshes has that other Australian specialty, the Botanical
Gardens. We cannot have these paradises.
The best we could do would be to cover a
vast acreage under
glass and apply steam heat. But it would be inadequate, the
lacks would still be so great: the confined sense, the sense of
suffocation, the
atmospheric dimness, the sweaty heat—these
would all be there, in place of
the Australian openness to the
sky, the sunshine and the breeze. Whatever will grow
under
glass with us will flourish rampantly out of doors in Australia.*
The greatest heat in Victoria, that there is an authoritative record of, was at
Sandhurst, in January, 1862. The thermometer then registered 117 degrees in the
shade.
In January, 1880, the heat at Adelaide, South Australia, was 172 degrees in
the
sun.
When the white man came the continent was nearly as poor, in
variety of vegetation, as the desert of Sahara; now it has
everything that grows on the earth. In fact, not Australia
only, but all Australasia has levied tribute upon the flora of
the rest of the world; and wherever one goes the results appear,
in gardens private and public, in the woodsy walls of the
highways, and in even the forests. If you see a curious or
beautiful tree or bush or flower, and ask about it, the people,
answering, usually name a foreign country as the place of its
origin—India, Africa, Japan, China, England, America, Java,
Sumatra, New Guinea, Polynesia, and so on.
In the Zoölogical Gardens of Adelaide I saw the only laughing
jackass that ever showed any disposition to be courteous
to me. This one opened his head wide and laughed like a
demon; or like a maniac who was consumed with humorous
scorn over a cheap and degraded pun. It was a very human
laugh. If he had been out of sight I could have believed
that the laughter came from a man. It is an odd-looking bird,
with a head and beak that are much too large for its body.
In time man
will exterminate
the rest of
the wild creatures
of Australia,
but this
one will probably
survive,
for man is his
friend and lets
him alone.
Man always
has a good
reason for his
charities towards
wild
things, human
or animal—
when he has
any. In this
case the bird is
spared because he kills snakes. If L. J. will take my advice
he will not kill all of them.
LAUGHING JACKASS.
In that garden I also saw the wild Australian dog—the
dingo. He was a
beautiful creature—shapely, graceful, a
little wolfish in some of his
aspects, but with a most friendly
eye and sociable disposition. The dingo is not an
importation;
he was present in great force when the whites first came to the
continent. It may be that he is the oldest dog in the universe;
his origin, his descent, the place where his ancestors first appeared,
are as unknown and as untraceable as are the camel's.
He is the most precious dog in the world, for he does not bark.
But in an evil hour he got to raiding the sheep-runs to appease
his hunger, and that sealed his doom. He is hunted, now, just
as if he were a wolf. He has been sentenced to extermination,
and the sentence will be carried out. This is all right, and not
objectionable. The world was made for man—the white man.
South Australia is confusingly named. All of the colonies
have a southern exposure
except one—Queensland. Properly
speaking, South Australia is middle Australia. It extends
straight up through the center of the
continent like the middle
board in a center-table. It is 2,000 miles high, from south to
north, and about a third as wide. A wee little spot down in
its southeastern
corner contains eight or nine-tenths of its
population; the other one or two-tenths are
elsewhere—as
elsewhere as they could be in the United States with all the
country between Denver and Chicago, and Canada and the
Gulf of Mexico to scatter
over. There is plenty of room.
A telegraph line stretches straight up north through that
2,000 miles of wilderness
and desert from Adelaide to Port
Darwin on the edge of the upper ocean. South Australia
built the line; and did it in 1871-2 when her population numbered
only 185,000. It was a great work; for there were no
roads, no paths; 1,300 miles
of the route had been traversed
but once before by white men; provisions, wire, and
poles had
to be carried over immense stretches of desert; wells had to be
dug
along the route to supply the men and cattle with water.
A cable had been previously laid from Port Darwin to
Java and thence to India, and
there was telegraphic communication
with England from India. And so, if Adelaide could
make connection with Port
Darwin it meant connection with
the whole world. The enterprise succeeded. One could
watch
THE WHITE MAN'S WORLD.
the London markets daily, now; the profit to the wool-growers
of Australia was instant and enormous.
A telegram from Melbourne to San Francisco covers approximately
20,000 miles—the equivalent of five-sixths of the
way around the globe.
It has to halt along the way a good
many times and be repeated; still, but little time
is lost. These
halts, and the distances between them, are here tabulated.*
From "Round the Empire." (George R. Parkin), all but the last two.
Miles.Melbourne—Mount Gambier,300Mount Gambier—Adelaide,270Adelaide—Port Augusta,200Port Augusta—Alice Springs,1,036Alice Springs—Port Darwin,898Port Darwin—Banjoewangie,1,150Banjoewangie—Batavia,480Batavia—Singapore,553Singapore—Penang,399Penang—Madras,1,280Madras—Bombay,650Bombay—Aden,1,662Aden—Suez,1,346Suez—Alexandria,224Alexandria—Malta,828Malta—Gibraltar,1,008Gibraltar—Falmouth,1,061Falmouth—London,350London—New York,2,500New York—San Francisco,3,500I was in Adelaide again, some months later, and saw the
multitudes gather in the
neighboring city of Glenelg to commemorate
the Reading of the Proclamation—in 1836—which
founded the
Province. If I have at any time called it a
Colony, I withdraw the discourtesy. It is
not a Colony, it is a
Province; and officially so. Moreover, it is the only one so
named in Australasia. There was great enthusiasm; it was
the Province's national
holiday, its Fourth of July, so to
speak. It is the pre-eminent holiday; and that is
saying
much, in a country where they seem to have a most un-English
mania for
holidays. Mainly they are workingmen's holidays;
for in South Australia the workingman
is sovereign; his vote
is the desire of the politician—indeed, it is the very
breath of
the politician's being; the parliament exists to deliver the will
of the
workingman, and the government exists to execute it.
The workingman is a great power
everywhere in Australia,
but South Australia is his paradise. He has had a hard time
in this world, and has earned a paradise. I am glad he has
found it. The holidays
there are frequent enough to be bewil-
dering to the stranger. I tried to get the hang of the system,
but was not able to do
it.
You have seen that the Province is tolerant, religious-wise.
It is so politically,
also. One of the speakers at the Commemoration
banquet—the Minister of Public Works—was an
American, born
and reared in New England. There is nothing
narrow about the Province, politically, or
in any other way
that I know of. Sixty-four religions and a Yankee cabinet
minister. No amount of horse-racing can damn this community.
The mean temperature of the Province is 62°. The death-rate
is 13 in the 1,000—about half what it is in the city of
New York, I
should think, and New York is a healthy city.
Thirteen is the death-rate for the average
citizen of the Province,
but there seems to be no
death-rate for the old people.
There were people at the Commemoration banquet who could
remember Cromwell. There were six of them. These Old
Settlers had all been present
at the original Reading of the
Proclamation, in 1836. They showed signs of the
blightings
and blastings of time, in their outward aspect, but they were
young
within; young and cheerful, and ready to talk; ready
to talk, and talk all you wanted;
in their turn, and out of it.
They were down for six speeches, and they made 42. The
governor and the cabinet and the mayor were down for 42
speeches, and they made 6.
They have splendid grit, the Old
Settlers, splendid staying power. But they do not hear
well,
and when they see the mayor going through motions which
they recognize as
the introducing of a speaker, they think they
are the one, and they all get up together,
and begin to respond,
in the most animated way; and the more the mayor gesticulates,
and shouts "Sit down! Sit down!" the more
they take
it for applause, and the more excited and reminiscent and enthusiastic
they get; and next, when they see the whole house
laughing and crying, three of
them think it is about the bitter
old-time hardships they are describing, and the other
three
THE OLD SETTLERS.
think the laughter is caused by the jokes they have been uncorking—jokes
of the vintage of 1836—and then the way
they do
go on! And finally when ushers come and plead, and
beg, and gently and reverently crowd
them down into their
seats, they say, "Oh, I'm not tired—I could bang along a
week!" and they sit there looking simple and childlike, and
gentle, and proud of
their oratory, and wholly unconscious of
what is going on at the other end of the room.
And so one
of the great dignitaries gets a chance, and begins his carefully-prepared
speech, impressively and with solemnity—
"When we, now great and prosperous and powerful, bow our heads in
reverent wonder in
the contemplation of those sublimities of energy, of wisdom,
of forethought, of—"
Up come the immortal six again, in a body, with a joyous
"Hey, I've thought of another
one!" and at it they go, with
might and main, hearing not a whisper of the pandemonium
that salutes them, but taking all the visible violences for
applause, as before,
and hammering joyously away till the imploring
ushers pray them into their seats again. And a pity,
too; for those lovely old
boys did so enjoy living their heroic
youth over, in these days of their honored
antiquity; and certainly
the things they had to tell were usually worth the telling
and the hearing.
It was a stirring spectacle; stirring in more ways than one,
for it was amazingly
funny, and at the same time deeply
pathetic; for they had seen so much, these time-worn
veterans,
and had suffered so much; and had built so strongly and well,
and laid
the foundations of their commonwealth so deep, in
liberty and tolerance; and had lived
to see the structure rise
to such state and dignity and hear themselves so praised for
their honorable work.
One of these old gentlemen told me some things of interest
afterward: things about the
aboriginals, mainly. He thought
them intelligent—remarkably so in some
directions—and he
said that along with their unpleasant qualities they had some
exceedingly good ones;
and he considered it a great pity that
the race had died out. He instanced their
invention of the
boomerang and the "weet-weet" as evidences of their brightness;
and as another evidence of it he said he had
never seen
a white man who had cleverness enough to learn to do the
miracles with
those two toys that the aboriginals achieved.
He said that even the smartest whites had
been obliged to confess
that they could not learn the trick of the boomerang in
perfection; that it had
possibilities which they could not
master. The white man could not control its motions,
could
not make it obey him; but the aboriginal could. He told me
some wonderful
things—some almost incredible things—
which he had seen the blacks
do with the boomerang and the
weet-weet. They have been confirmed to me since by other
early settlers and by trustworthy books.
It is contended—and may be said to be conceded—that
the
boomerang was known to certain savage tribes in Europe
in Roman times. In support of
this, Virgil and two other
Roman poets are quoted. It is also contended that it was
known to the ancient Egyptians.
One of two things is then apparent:
either some one with
ADAM AT PRACTICE.
a boomerang arrivedin Australia in the
days of antiquity before
European knowledge
of the thing had
been lost, or the Australian
aboriginal reinvented
it. It will
take some time to find out which of these two propositions is
the fact. But there is no hurry.
CHAPTER XX.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably
precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence
never to practice either of them.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
diary:
Mr. G. called. I had not seen him since Nauheim,
Germany—several years ago;
the time that the cholera
broke out at Hamburg. We talked of the people we had
known there, or had casually met; and G. said:
"Do you remember my introducing you to an earl—the
Earl of C.?"
"Yes. That was the last time I saw you. You and he
were in a carriage, just
starting—belated—for the train. I
remember it."
"I remember it too, because of a thing which happened
then which I was not looking
for. He had told me a while before,
about a remarkable and
interesting Californian whom he
had met and who was a friend of yours, and said that if
he
should ever meet you he would ask you for some particulars
about that
Californian. The subject was not mentioned that
day at Nauheim, for we were hurrying
away, and there was
no time; but the thing that surprised me was this: when I introduced
you, you said, 'I am glad to meet your lordship—
again.' The 'again'
was the surprise. He is a little hard of
hearing, and didn't catch that word, and I
thought you hadn't
intended that he should. As we drove off I had only time to
say, 'Why, what do you know about him?' and I understood
you to say, 'Oh, nothing,
except that he is the quickest judge
of—' Then we were gone, and I didn't get the rest. I wondered
what it was that he was such a quick judge of. I have
thought of it many times
since, and still wondered what it
could be. He and I talked it over, but could not guess
it out.
He thought it must be fox-hounds or horses, for he is a
good judge of
those—no one is a better. But you couldn't
know that,
because you didn't know him; you had mistaken him
for some one
else; it must be that, he said, because he knew
you had never met him before. And of
course you hadn't—
had you?"
"Yes, I had."
"Is that so? Where?"
"At a fox-hunt, in England."
"How curious that is. Why, he hadn't the least recollection
of it. Had you any conversation with him?"
"Some—yes."
"Well, it left not the least impression upon him. What
did you talk about?"
"About the fox. I think that was all."
"Why, that would interest him; that ought to have left an
impression. What did he talk about?"
"The fox."
"It's very curious. I don't understand it. Did what he
said leave an impression upon
you?"
"Yes. It showed me that he was a quick judge of—however,
I will tell you all about it, then you will understand.
It
was a quarter of a century ago—1873 or '74. I had an American
friend in London named F., who was fond of hunting, and
his friends the Blanks
invited him and me to come out to a
hunt and be their guests at their country place. In
the morning
the mounts were provided, but when I saw the horses I
changed my mind and asked
permission to walk. I had never
seen an English hunter before, and it seemed to me that
I
"WHICH FOX?"
could hunt a fox safer on the ground. I had always been diffident
about horses, anyway, even those of the common altitudes,
and I did not feel competent to hunt on a horse that
went on stilts. So then Mrs.
Blank came to my help and said
I could go with her in the dog-cart and we would drive to
a
place she knew of, and there we should have a good glimpse of
the hunt as it
went by.
"When we got to that place I got out and went and leaned
my elbows on a low stone wall
which enclosed a turfy and
beautiful great field with heavy wood on all its sides except
ours. Mrs. Blank sat in the dog-cart fifty yards away, which
was as near as she
could get with the vehicle. I was full of
interest, for I had never seen a fox-hunt. I
waited, dreaming
and imagining, in the deep stillness and impressive tranquility
which reigned in that retired spot. Presently, from away off
in the forest on the left,
a mellow bugle-note came floating;
then all of a sudden a multitude of dogs burst out of
that forest
and went tearing by and disappeared in the forest on the right;
there
was a pause, and then a cloud of horsemen in black caps
and crimson coats plunged out of
the left-hand forest and went
flaming across the field like a prairie-fire, a stirring
sight to
see. There was one man ahead of the rest, and he came spurring
straight at me. He was fiercely excited. It was fine to
see him ride; he was a
master horseman. He came like a
storm till he was within seven feet of me, where I was
leaning
on the wall, then he stood his horse straight up in the air on
his hind
toe-nails, and shouted like a demon:
"'Which way'd the fox go?'
"I didn't much like the tone, but I did not let on; for he
was excited, you know. But
I was calm; so I said softly, and
without acrimony:
"'Which fox?'
"It seemed to anger him. I don't know why; and he
thundered out:
"'Which fox? Why, the fox? Which way did the fox go?'
"I said, with great gentleness—even argumentatively:
"'If you could be a little more definite—a little less vague
—because I am a stranger, and there are many foxes, as you
will know even
better than I, and unless I know which one it
is that you desire to identify,
and—'
"'You're certainly the damdest idiot that has escaped in a
thousand years!' and he
snatched his great horse around as
easily as I would snatch a cat, and was away like a
hurricane.
A very excitable man.
"I went back to Mrs. Blank, and she was excited, too—oh,
all alive. She said:
"'He spoke to you!—didn't he?'
"'Yes, it is what happened.'
"'I knew it! I couldn't hear what he said, but I knew he
spoke to you! Do you know who it was? It was Lord C.,—
and he is Master of the Buckhounds! Tell me—what do you
think of him?'
"'Him? Well, for sizing-up a stranger, he's got the most
sudden and accurate judgment
of any man I ever saw.'
"It pleased her. I thought it would."
G. got away from Nauheim just in time to escape being
shut in by the quarantine-bars
on the frontiers; and so did we,
for we left the next day. But G. had a great deal of
trouble
in getting by the Italian custom-house, and we should have
fared likewise
but for the thoughtfulness of our consul-general
in Frankfort. He introduced me to the
Italian consul-general,
and I brought away from that consulate a letter which made
our way smooth. It was a dozen lines merely commending me
in a general way to the
courtesies of servants in his Italian
Majesty's service, but it was more powerful than
it looked. In
addition to a raft of ordinary baggage, we had six or eight
trunks which were filled
exclusively with dutiable stuff—household
goods purchased in Frankfort for use in Florence, where
we had taken a house. I
was going to ship these through by
express; but at the last moment an order went
throughout Germany
forbidding the moving of any parcels by train unless the
owner went with them.
This was a bad outlook. We must
take these things along, and the delay sure to be caused
by the
examination of them in the custom-house might lose us our
train. I imagined
all sorts of terrors, and enlarged them
steadily as we approached the Italian frontier.
We were six
in number, clogged with all that baggage, and I was courier
for the
party—the most incapable one they ever employed.
We arrived, and pressed with the crowd into the immense
custom-house, and the usual
worries began; everybody crowding
to the counter and begging to have his baggage examined
first, and all hands
clattering and chattering at once. It seemed
to me that I could do nothing; it would be
better to give it all
up and go away and leave the baggage. I couldn't speak the
language; I should never accomplish anything. Just then a
tall handsome man in a fine
uniform was passing by and I
knew he must be the station-master—and that
reminded me of
my letter. I ran to him and put it into his hands. He took it
out
of the envelope, and the moment his eye caught the royal
coat of arms printed at its
top, he took off his cap and made a
beautiful bow to me, and said in English—
"Which is your baggage? Please show it to me."
I showed him the mountain. Nobody was disturbing it;
nobody was interested in it; all
the family's attempts to get
attention to it had failed—except in the case of
one of the trunks
containing the dutiable goods. It was just being opened. My
officer said—
"There, let that alone! Lock it. Now chalk it. Chalk
all of the lot. Now please come and show me the hand-baggage."
He plowed through the waiting crowd, I following, to the
counter, and he gave orders
again, in his emphatic military
way—
"Chalk these. Chalk all of them."
Then he took off his cap and made that beautiful bow again,
and went his way. By this
time these attentions had attracted
the wonder of that acre of passengers, and the
whisper had
gone around that the royal family were present getting their
baggage
chalked; and as we passed down in review on our way
to the door, I was conscious of a
pervading atmosphere of envy
which gave me deep satisfaction.
But soon there was an accident. My overcoat pockets were
stuffed with German cigars
and linen packages of American
smoking tobacco, and a porter was following us around
with
this overcoat on his arm, and gradually getting it upside down.
Just as I, in
the rear of my family, moved by the sentinels at
the door, about three hatfuls of the
tobacco tumbled out on the
floor. One of the soldiers pounced upon it, gathered it up in
his arms, pointed back whence I had come, and marched me
ahead of him past that
long wall of passengers again—he
chattering and exulting like a devil, they
smiling in peaceful
joy, and I trying to look as if my pride was not hurt, and as if
I did not mind being brought to shame before these pleased
people who had so
lately envied me. But at heart I was
cruelly humbled.
When I had been marched two-thirds of the long distance
and the misery of it was at
the worst, the stately station-master
stepped out from somewhere, and the soldier left me and
darted after him and
overtook him; and I could see by the
soldier's excited gestures that he was betraying to
him the
whole shabby business. The station-master was plainly very
"WE MARCHED THROUGH THE CROWD"
angry. He came striding down toward me, and when he was
come near he began to pour out
a stream of indignant Italian;
then suddenly took off his hat and made that beautiful
bow
and said—
"Oh, it is you! I beg a thousands pardons! This idiot
here—" He turned to the exulting soldier and burst out with
a flood of
white-hot Italian lava, and the next moment he was
bowing, and the soldier and I were
moving in procession again
—he in the lead and
ashamed, this time, I with my chin up.
And so we marched by the crowd of fascinated
passengers, and
I went forth to the train with the honors of war. Tobacco and
all.
THE ROYAL LETTER.
CHAPTER XXI.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get
himself envied.
—Puddn'head Wilson's New Calendar.
I saw Australia I had never heard of the
"weet-weet"
at all. I met but few men who had seen
it thrown—at least I met but few who
mentioned
having seen it thrown. Roughly described, it is a fat wooden
cigar with
its butt-end fastened to a flexible twig. The whole
thing is only a couple of feet long,
and weighs less than two
ounces. This feather—so to call it—is not
thrown through
the air, but is flung with an underhanded throw and made to
strike
the ground a little way in front of the thrower; then it
glances and makes a long skip;
glances again, skips again, and
again and again, like the flat stone which a boy sends
skating
over the water. The water is smooth, and the stone has a
good chance; so a
strong man may make it travel fifty or
seventy-five yards; but the weet-weet has no such
good chance,
for it strikes sand, grass, and earth in its course. Yet an
expert
aboriginal has sent it a measured distance of two
hundred and twenty
yards. It would have gone even further
but it encountered rank ferns and underwood
on its passage
and they damaged its speed. Two hundred and twenty yards;
and so
weightless a toy—a mouse on the end of a bit of wire,
in effect; and not
sailing through the accomodating air, but
encountering grass and sand and stuff at every
jump. It looks
wholly impossible; but Mr. Brough Smyth saw the feat and
did the
measuring, and set down the facts in his book about
aboriginal life, which he wrote by
command of the Victorian
Government.
What is the secret of the feat? No one explains. It
cannot be physical strength, for
that could not drive such a
feather-weight any distance. It must be art. But no one explains
what the art of it is; nor how it gets around that law
of nature which says you
shall not throw any two-ounce thing
220 yards, either through the air or bumping along
the ground.
Rev. J. G. Woods says:
"The distance to which the weet-weet or kangaroo-rat can be thrown is
truly
astonishing. I have seen an Australian stand at one side of Kennington
Oval and throw
the kangaroo-rat completely across it." (Width of Kennington
Oval not stated.) "It darts through the air with the sharp and menacing
hiss of a rifle-ball, its greatest height from the ground being some seven
or
eight feet.…. . When properly thrown it looks just like a living
animal
leaping along.…. . Its movements have a wonderful
resemblance to the long
leaps of a kangaroo-rat fleeing in alarm, with its long
tail trailing behind it."
The Old Settler said that he had seen distances made by the
weet-weet, in the early
days, which almost convinced him that
it was as extraordinary an instrument as the
boomerang.
There must have been a large distribution of acuteness
among those naked skinny
aboriginals, or they couldn't have
been such unapproachable trackers and boomerangers
and
weet-weeters. It must have been race-aversion that put upon
them a good deal
of the low-rate intellectual reputation which
they bear and have borne this long time in
the world's estimate
of them.
They were lazy—always lazy. Perhaps that was their
trouble. It is a killing
defect. Surely they could have invented
and built a competent house, but they didn't. And
they could have invented and
developed the agricultural arts,
but they didn't. They went naked and houseless, and
lived
on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just
plain savages,
for all their smartness.
With a country as big as the United States to live and
multiply in, and with no
epidemic diseases among them till the
white man came with those and his other appliances of
civilization, it is quite
probable that there was never a day in
his history when he could muster 100,000 of his
race in all
THE WHITE MAN'S APPLIANCES.
Australia. He diligently and deliberately kept populationdown by infanticide—largely; but mainly by
certain other methods. He
did not need to practise
these artificialities any more
after the white man came.
The white man knew ways
of keeping down population
which were worth
several of his. The
white man knew ways
of reducing a native
population 80 per
cent. in 20 years. The
native had never seen anything as fine as that before.
For example, there is the case of the country now called
Victoria—a country
eighty times as large as Rhode Island, as
I have already said. By the best official
guess there were
4,500 aboriginals in it when the whites came along in the
middle
of the'Thirties. Of these, 1,000 lived in Gippsland,
a patch of territory the size of
fifteen or sixteen Rhode Islands:
they did not diminish as fast as some of the other
communities;
indeed, at the end of forty years there were still 200 of them
left.
The Geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from
173 persons it faded to 34 in
twenty years; at the end of
another twenty the tribe numbered one person altogether.
The two Melbourne tribes could muster almost 300 when the
white man came; they
could muster but twenty, thirty-seven
years later, in 1875. In that year there were
still odds and
ends of tribes scattered about the colony of Victoria, but I
was told that natives of full blood are very scarce now. It is
said that the
aboriginals continue in some force in the huge
territory called Queensland.
The early whites were not used to savages. They could
not understand the primary law
of savage life: that if a man
do you a wrong, his whole tribe is
responsible—each individual
of it—and you may take your change out
of any individual
of it, without bothering to seek out the guilty one. When a
white killed an aboriginal, the tribe applied the ancient law,
and killed the first
white they came across. To the whites
this was a monstrous thing. Extermination seemed
to be the
proper medicine for such creatures as this. They did not kill
all the
blacks, but they promptly killed enough of them to
make their own persons safe. From the
dawn of civilization
down to this day the white man has always used that very
precaution. Mrs. Campbell Praed lived in Queensland, as a
child, in the early days, and
in her "Sketches of Australian
life," we get informing pictures of the early struggles
of the
white and the black to reform each other.
Speaking of pioneer days in the mighty wilderness of
Queensland, Mrs. Praed says:
"At first the natives retreated before the whites; and, except that they
every now and
then speared a beast in one of the herds, gave little cause for
uneasiness. But, as the
number of squatters increased, each one taking up
miles of country and bringing two or
three men in his train, so that shepherds'
huts and stockmen's camps lay far apart, and
defenseless in the midst of
hostile tribes, the Blacks' depredations became more
frequent and murder
was no unusual event.
"The loneliness of the Australian bush can hardly be painted in words.
Here extends
mile after mile of primeval forest where perhaps foot of white
man has never
trod—interminable vistas where the eucalyptus trees rear their
lofty trunks
and spread forth their lanky limbs, from which the red gum
oozes and hangs in fantastic
pendants like crimson stalactites; ravines along
the sides of which the long-bladed
grass grows rankly; level untimbered
plains alternating with undulating tracts of
pasture, here and there broken
by a stony ridge, steep gully, or dried-up creek. All
wild, vast and desolate;
all the same monotonous gray coloring, except where the wattle,
when in
blossom, shows patches of feathery gold, or a belt of scrub lies green, glossy,
and
impenetrable as Indian jungle.
"The solitude seems intensified by the strange sounds of reptiles, birds,
and insects,
and by the absence of larger creatures; of which in the daytime,
the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd of kangaroo, or the
rustle of a
wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. But
there are the
whirring of locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jackass,
the screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard,
and
the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth.
And then at
night, the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the dismal howling
of dingoes, the
discordant croaking of tree-frogs, might well shake the
nerves of the solitary watcher."
That is the theater for the drama. When you comprehend
one or two other details, you
will perceive how well suited for
trouble it was, and how loudly it invited it. The
cattlemen's
stations were scattered over that profound wilderness miles
and miles
apart—at each station half a dozen persons. There
was a plenty of cattle, the
black natives were always ill-nourished
and hungry. The land belonged to them. The
whites had not
bought it, and couldn't buy it; for the tribes
had no chiefs, nobody in authority,
nobody competent to sell
and convey; and the tribes themselves had no comprehension
of the idea of transferable ownership of land. The ousted
owners were despised by
the white interlopers, and this opinion
was not hidden under a bushel. More promising
materials for
a tragedy could not have been collated. Let Mrs. Praed speak:
"At Nie Nie station, one dark night, the unsuspecting hut-keeper, having,
as he
believed, secured himself against assault, was lying wrapped in his
blankets sleeping
profoundly. The Blacks crept stealthily down the chimney
and battered in his skull while
he slept."
One could guess the whole drama from that little text.
The curtain was up. It would
not fall until the mastership of
one party or the other was determined—and
permanently:
"There was treachery on both sides. The Blacks killed the Whites when
they found them
defenseless, and the Whites slew the Blacks in a wholesale
and promiscuous fashion which
offended against my childish sense of justice.
…They were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some
cases
were destroyed like vermin.
"Here is an instance. A squatter, whose station was surrounded by Blacks,
whom he
suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed
with them from his
house-door. He told them it was Christmas-time—a time
at which all men, black
or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums,
good things in plenty in the
store, and that he would make for them such a
pudding as they had never dreamed
of—a great pudding of which all might
eat and be filled. The Blacks listened
and were lost. The pudding was
made and distributed. Next morning there was howling in
the camp, for it
had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!"
The white man's spirit was right, but his method was
wrong. His spirit was the spirit
which the civilized white has
always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison
was
a departure from custom. True, it was merely a technical
departure, not a real
one; still, it was a departure, and therefore
a mistake, in my opinion. It was better, kinder, swifter,
THE USUAL SPIRIT.
and much more humane than a number of the methods whichhave been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its
employment. That is, it does not wholly justify it. Its unusual
nature makes it stand out and attract an amount of
attention which it is not entitled to. It takes hold upon
morbid imaginations and they work it up into a sort of exhibition
of cruelty, and this smirches the good name of our civilization,
whereas one of the old harsher methods would have had
no such effect because usage has made those methods familiar
to us and innocent. In
many countries we have chained the
savage and starved him to death; and this we do not
care for,
because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by
poison is
lovingkindness to it. In many countries we have
burned the savage at the stake; and this
we do not care
for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death
is
lovingkindness to it. In more than one country we have
hunted the savage and his little
children and their mother
with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an
afternoon's sport, and filled the region with happy laughter
over their sprawling and
stumbling flight, and their wild supplications
for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because
custom has inured us to it; yet
a quick death by poison is
lovingkindness to it. In many countries we have taken the
savage's land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed
him every day, and
broken his pride, and made death his only
friend, and overworked him till he dropped in
his tracks; and
this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it;
yet a
quick death by poison is lovingkindness to it. In the
Matabeleland
to-day—why, there we are confining ourselves
to sanctified custom, we
Rhodes-Beit millionaires in South
Africa and Dukes in London; and nobody cares, because
we
are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is that no
notice-inviting new
ones shall be intruded upon the attention of
our comfortable consciences. Mrs. Praed
says of the poisoner,
"That squatter deserves to have his name handed down to the
contempt of posterity."
I am sorry to hear her say that. I myself blame him for
one thing, and severely, but I
stop there. I blame him for
the indiscretion of introducing a novelty which was
calculated
to attract attention to our civilization. There was no occasion
to do
that. It was his duty, and it is every loyal man's duty
to protect that heritage in every way he can; and the best
way to do that is to
attract attention elsewhere. The squatter's
judgment was bad—that is plain; but his heart was
right. He is almost
the only pioneering representative of
civilization in history who has risen above the
prejudices of his
caste and his heredity and tried to introduce the element of
mercy into the superior race's dealings with the savage. His
name is lost, and it is a
pity; for it deserves to be handed
down to posterity with homage and reverence.
This paragraph is from a London journal:
"To learn what France is doing to spread the blessings of civilization in
her distant
dependencies we may turn with advantage to New Caledonia.
With a view to attracting free
settlers to that penal colony, M. Feillet, the
Governor, forcibly expropriated the
Kanaka cultivators from the best of their
plantations, with a derisory compensation, in
spite of the protests of the
Council General of the island. Such immigrants as could be
induced to cross
the seas thus found themselves in possession of thousands of coffee,
cocoa,
banana, and bread-fruit trees, the raising of which had cost the wretched
natives years of toil, whilst the latter had a few five-franc pieces to spend in
the
liquor stores of Noumea."
You observe the combination? It is robbery, humiliation,
and slow, slow murder,
through poverty and the white man's
whisky. The savage's gentle friend, the savage's
noble friend,
the only magnanimous and unselfish friend the savage has ever
had,
was not there with the merciful swift release of his poisoned
pudding.
There are many humorous things in the world; among
them the white man's notion that he
is less savage than the
other savages.*
See Chapter on Tasmania, post.
1967CHAPTER XXII.
Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
notice that Mrs. Praed knows her art. She can
place a
thing before you so that you can see it. She
is not alone in that. Australia is fertile
in writers
whose books are faithful mirrors of the life of the country and
of its
history. The materials were surprisingly rich, both in
quality and in mass, and Marcus
Clarke, Ralph Boldrewood, Gordon,
Kendall, and the others,
have built out of them a brilliant
and vigorous literature, and one which must endure.
Materials—there
is no end to them! Why, a literature might be
made out of the aboriginal all by
himself, his character and
ways are so freckled with varieties—varieties not
staled by
familiarity, but new to us. You do not need to invent any
picturesquenesses; whatever you want in that line he can furnish
you; and they will not be fancies and doubtful, but realities
and authentic. In his history, as preserved by the white
man's official records,
he is everything—everything that a human
creature can be. He covers the entire ground. He is a
coward—there are
a thousand fact to prove it. He is brave
—there are a thousand facts to prove
it. He is treacherous—
oh, beyond imagination! he is faithful, loyal,
true—the white
man's records supply you with a harvest of instances of it
that
are noble, worshipful, and pathetically beautiful. He kills the
starving
stranger who comes begging for food and shelter—
there is proof of it. He
succors, and feeds, and guides to
safety, to-day, the lost stranger who fired on him
only yester-
day—there is proof of it. He takes his reluctant bride by
force, he courts
her with a club, then loves her faithfully
through a long life—it is of
record. He gathers to himself
another wife by the same processes, beats and bangs her
as a daily diversion, and by and by lays down his life in
defending her from some
outside harm—it is of record.
He will face a hundred hostiles to rescue one
of his children,
and will kill another of his children because the family is large
enough without it. His delicate stomach turns, at certain details
of the white man's food; but he likes over-ripe fish, and
brazed dog, and cat, and
rat, and will eat his own uncle with
relish. He is a sociable animal, yet he turns aside
and hides
behind his shield when his mother-in-law goes by. He is
childishly
afraid of ghosts and other trivialities that menace
his soul, but dread of physical pain
is a weakness which he is
not acquainted with. He knows all the great and many of the
little constellations, and has names for them; he has a symbol-writing
by means of which he can convey messages far and
wide among the tribes; he has a
correct eye for form and expression,
and draws a good
picture; he can track a fugitive by
delicate traces which the white man's eye cannot
discern, and
by methods which the finest white intelligence cannot master;
he makes a missile which science itself cannot duplicate
without
the model—if with it; a missile whose secret baffled
and defeated the
searchings and theorizings of the white
mathematicians for seventy years; and by an art
all his own
he performs miracles with it which the white man cannot approach
untaught, nor parallel after teaching. Within certain
limits this savage's
intellect is the alertest and the brightest
known to history or tradition; and yet the
poor creature was
never able to invent a counting system that would reach above
five, nor a vessel that he could boil water in. He is the prize-curiosity
of all the races. To all intents and purposes he is
dead—in the body; but he has features that will live in
literature.
Mr. Philip Chauncy, an officer of the Victorian Government,
contributed to its archives a report of his personal observations
of the aboriginals which has in it some things which
I wish to condense slightly
and insert here. He speaks of the
quickness of their eyes and the accuracy of their
judgment of
the direction of approaching missiles as being quite extraordinary,
and of the answering suppleness and
accuracy of limb
and muscle in avoiding the missile as being extraordinary also.
He has seen an aboriginal stand as a target for cricket-balls
thrown with great force
ten or fifteen yards, by professional
bowlers, and successfully dodge them or parry them
with his
shield during about half an hour. One of those balls, properly
placed,
could have killed him; "Yet he depended, with the
utmost self-possession, on the
quickness of his eye and his
agility."
The shield was the customary war-shield of his race, and
would not be a protection to
you or to me. It is no broader
than a stovepipe, and is about as long as a man's arm.
The
opposing surface is not flat, but slopes away from the centerline
like a boat's bow. The difficulty about a cricket-ball that
has been thrown with a
scientific "twist" is, that it suddenly
changes it course when it is close to its target
and comes
straight for the mark when apparently it was going overhead
or to one
side. I should not be able to protect myself from
such balls for half-an-hour, or less.
Mr. Chauncy once saw "a little native man" throw a cricket-ball
119 yards. This is said to beat the English professional
record by thirteen yards.
We have all seen the circus-man bound into the air from a
spring-board and make a
somersault over eight horses standing
side by side. Mr. Chauncy saw an aboriginal do it
over eleven;
and was assured that he had sometimes done it over fourteen.
But what is that to this:
"I saw the same man leap from the ground, and in going over he dipped
his head, unaided by his hands, into a hat placed in an inverted position on the
top of the head of another man sitting upright on horseback—both man and
horse being of the average size. The native landed on the other side of the
horse with
the hat fairly on his head. The prodigious height of the leap, and
the precision with
which it was taken so as to enable him to dip his head into
the hat, exceeded any feat
of the kind I have ever beheld."
I should think so! On board a ship lately I saw a young
Oxford athlete run four steps and spring into the air and
squirm his hips by a
side-twist over a bar that was five and
one-half feet high; but he could not have stood
still and
cleared a bar that was four feet high. I know this,
because I
tried it myself.
One can see now where the kangaroo learned its art.
Sir George Grey and Mr. Eyre testify that the natives dug
wells fourteen or fifteen
feet deep and two feet in diameter at
the bore—dug them in the sand—wells that were "quite circular,
carried straight down, and the work beautifully executed."
Their tools were their hands and feet. How did they
throw sand out from such a depth?
How could they stoop
down and get it, with only two feet of space to stoop in?
How
did they keep that sand-pipe from caving in on them?
I do not know. Still, they did
manage those seeming impossibilities.
Swallowed the
sand, may be.
Mr. Chauncy speaks highly of the patience and skill and
alert intelligence of the
native huntsman when he is stalking
the emu, the kangaroo, and other game:
"As he walks through the bush his step is light, elastic, and noiseless;
every track
on the earth catches his keen eye; a leaf, or fragment of a stick
turned, or a blade of
grass recently bent by the tread of one of the lower animals,
instantly arrests his attention; in fact, nothing escapes his quick and
powerful
sight on the ground, in the trees, or in the distance, which may
supply him with a meal
or warn him of danger. A little examination of the
trunk of a tree which may be nearly covered with the scratches of opossums
ascending
and descending is sufficient to inform him whether one went up the
night before without coming down again or not."
Fennimore Cooper lost his chance. He would have known
how to value these people. He
wouldn't have traded the dullest
of them for the brightest Mohawk he ever invented.
All savages draw outline pictures upon bark; but the resemblances
are not close, and expression is usually lacking.
But the Australian aboriginal's
pictures of animals were nicely
accurate in form, attitude, carriage; and he put spirit
into
HIS PLACE IN ART.
them, and expression.And his pictures
of white people
and natives
were pretty nearly
as good as his pictures
of the other
animals. He
dressed his whites
in the fashion of
their day, both the
ladies and the gentlemen.
As an untaught wielder of the pencil it is not likely
that he has had his equal among savage people.
His place in art—as to drawing, not color-work—is well
up, all
things considered. His art is not to be classified with
savage art at all, but on a
plane two degrees above it and one
degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. To be
exact,
his place in art is between Botticelli and De Maurier. That is
to say, he
could not draw as well as De Maurier but better
than Boticelli. In feeling, he resembles
both; also in grouping
and in his preferences in the matter of subjects. His
"corrobboree" of the
Australian wilds reappears in De Mau-
rier's Belgravian ballrooms, with clothes and the smirk of
civilization added;
Botticelli's "Spring" is the corrobboree
further idealized, but with fewer clothes and
more smirk.
And well enough as to intention, but—my
word!
The aboriginal can make a fire by friction. I have tried
that.
All savages are able to stand a good deal of physical pain.
The Australian aboriginal
has this quality in a well-developed
degree. Do not read the following instances if
horrors are not
pleasant to you. They were recorded by the Rev. Henry N.
Wolloston, of Melbourne, who had been a surgeon before he
became a clergyman:
1. "In the summer of 1852 I started on horseback from Albany, King
George's Sound, to
visit at Cape Riche, accompanied by a native on foot.
We traveled about forty miles the
first day, then camped by a water-hole for
the night. After cooking and eating our
supper, I observed the native, who
had said nothing to me on the subject, collect the
hot embers of the fire together,
and deliberately place his
right foot in the glowing mass for a moment,
then suddenly withdraw it, stamping on the
ground and uttering a long-drawn
guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction. This operation he
repeated
several times. On my inquiring the meaning of his strange conduct,
he only said, 'Me
carpenter-make' em' ('I am mending my foot'), and then
showed me his
charred great toe, the nail of which had been torn off by a tea-tree
stump, in which it had been caught during the journey, and the pain of
which he
had borne with stoical composure until the evening, when he had an
opportunity of
cauterizing the wound in the primitive manner above described."
And he proceeded on the journey the next day, "as if
nothing had happened"
—and walked thirty miles. It was a
strange idea, to keep a surgeon and then
do his own surgery.
2. "A native about twenty-five years of age once applied to me, as a
doctor, to
extract the wooden barb of a spear, which, during a fight in the
bush some four months
previously, had entered his chest, just missing the
heart, and penetrated the viscera to
a considerable depth. The spear had
been cut off, leaving the barb behind, which
continued to force its way by
muscular action gradually toward the back; and when I
examined him I
could feel a hard substance between the ribs below the left blade-bone. I
made a deep incision, and with a pair of forceps extracted the barb, which
was
made, as usual, of hard wood about four inches long and from half an inch
to an inch
thick. It was very smooth, and partly digested, so to speak, by
the maceration to which it had been exposed during its four months' journey
through
the body. The wound made by the spear had long since healed,
leaving only a small
cicatrix; and after the operation, which the native bore
without flinching, he appeared
to suffer no pain. Indeed, judging from his
good state of health, the presence of the
foreign matter did not materially annoy
him. He was perfectly well in a few days."
But No. 3 is my favorite. Whenever I read it I seem to
enjoy all that the patient
enjoyed—whatever it was:
3. "Once at King George's Sound a native presented himself to me with
one leg only,
and requested me to supply him with a wooden leg. He had
traveled in this maimed state
about ninety-six miles, for this purpose. I examined
the limb, which had been severed just below the knee, and found that
it had been
charred by fire, while about two inches of the partially calcined
"NO FEELING IN IT."
bone protruded through the flesh. I at once removed this with the saw;and having made as presentable a stump of it as I could, covered the amputated
end of the bone with a surrounding of muscle, and kept the patient a
few days under my care to allow the wound to heal. On inquiring, the native
told me that in a fight with other blackfellows a spear had struck his leg
and penetrated the bone below the knee. Finding it was serious, he had recourse
to the following crude and barbarous operation, which it appears is not
uncommon among these people in their native state. He made a fire, and dug
a hole in the earth only sufficiently large to admit his leg, and deep enough to
allow the wounded part to be on a level with the surface of the ground. He
then surrounded the limb with the live coals or charcoal, which was replenished
until the leg was literally burnt off. The cauterization thus applied completely
checked the hemorrhage, and he was able in a day or two to hobble
down to the Sound, with the aid of a long stout stick, although he was more
than a week on the road."
But he was a fastidious native. He soon discarded the
wooden leg made for him by the
doctor, because "it had no
feeling in it." It must have had as much as the one he burnt
off, I should think.
So much for the Aboriginals. It is difficult for me to let
them alone. They are
marvelously interesting creatures. For
a quarter of a century, now, the several colonial
governments
have housed their remnants in comfortable stations, and fed
them well
and taken good care of them in every way. If I
had found this out while I was in
Australia I could have seen
some of those people—but I didn't. I would walk
thirty miles
to see a stuffed one.
Australia has a slang of its own. This is a matter of
course. The vast cattle and
sheep industries, the strange
aspects of the country, and the strange native animals,
brute
and human, are matters which would naturally breed a local
slang. I have
notes of this slang somewhere, but at the moment
I can call to mind only a few of the words and phrases.
They are expressive ones.
The wide, sterile, unpeopled deserts
have created eloquent phrases like "No Man's Land"
and the
"Never-never Country." Also this felicitous form: "She lives
in the
Never-never Country"—that is, she is an old maid. And
this one is not without
merit: "heifer-paddock"—young
ladies' seminary. "Bail up" and "stick
up"—equivalent of
our highwayman-term to "hold up" a stage-coach or a train.
"New-chum" is the equivalent of our "tenderfoot"—new
arrival.
And then there is the immortal "My word!" We must
import it. "M-y word!" In cold print it is the equivalent of
our "Ger-reat
Cæsar!" but spoken with the proper Australian
unction and fervency, it is worth six of it for grace and charm
and expressiveness. Our
form is rude and explosive; it is not
suited to the drawing-room or the heifer-paddock;
but "M-y
word!" is, and is music to the ear, too, when the utterer
knows how to say it. I saw it in print several times on the
Pacific Ocean, but it struck me coldly, it aroused no sympathy.
That was because it was the dead corpse of the thing, the soul
was not there—the tones were lacking—the informing spirit
—the deep feeling—the cloquence. But the first time I heard
an Australian say it, it was positively thrilling.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
left Adelaide in due course, and went to Horsham,
in the
colony of Victoria; a good deal of a journey,
if I remember rightly, but pleasant.
Horsham sits
in a plain which is as level as a floor—one of those famous
dead levels which Australian books describe so often; gray,
bare, sombre,
melancholy, baked, cracked, in the tedious long
drouths, but a horizonless occan of
vivid green grass the day
after a rain. A country town, peaceful, reposeful, inviting,
full of snug homes, with garden plots, and plenty of shrubbery
and flowers.
"Horsham, October 17. At the hotel. The weather divine.
Across
the way, in front of the London Bank of Australia, is a
very handsome cottonwood. It is
in opulent leaf, and every
leaf perfect. The full power of the on-rushing spring is upon
it, and I imagine I can see it grow. Alongside the bank and a
little way back in
the garden there is a row of soaring fountain-sprays
of delicate feathery foliage quivering in the breeze, and
mottled with flashes of
light that shift and play through the
mass like flash-lights through an
opal—a most beautiful tree,
and a striking contrast to the cottonwood. Every
leaf of the
cottonwood is distinctly defined—it is a kodak for faithful,
hard, unsentimental detail; the other an impressionist picture,
delicious to look
upon, full of a subtle and exquisite charm, but
all details fused in a swoon of vague
and soft loveliness."
It turned out, upon inquiry, to be a pepper tree—an im-
portation from China. It has a silky sheen, soft and rich.
I saw some that had long
red bunches of currant-like berries
ambushed among the foliage. At a distance, in
certain lights,
they give the tree a pinkish tint and a new charm.
There is an agricultural college eight miles from Horsham.
We were driven out to it by
its chief. The conveyance was
an open wagon; the time, noonday; no wind; the sky without
a cloud, the sunshine brilliant—and the mercury at 92° in
the shade. In some countries an indolent unsheltered drive of
an hour and a half under
such conditions would have been a
sweltering and prostrating experience;
but there was nothing of that
in this case. It is a climate
that
is perfect. There was no sense of
heat; indeed, there was no heat;
the
air was fine and pure and exhilarating;
if the drive
had lasted half
a day I think we should not have
felt any discomfort, or grown
silent
or droopy or tired. Of course, the
secret of it was the exceeding dryness
of the atmosphere. In that
plain 112° in the shade is without
doubt no harder upon a man than is
88° or 90° in New York.
A WIDE SPACE.
The road lay through the middle
of an empty space which seemed to me to be a hundred
yards
wide between the fences. I was not given the width in yards,
but only in
chains and perches—and furlongs, I think. I
would have given a good deal to
know what the width was,
but I did not pursue the matter. I think it is best to put
up with information the way you get it; and seem satisfied
with it, and surprised
at it, and grateful for it, and say, "My
word!" and never let on. It was a wide space; I could tell
you how wide, in chains and
perches and furlongs and things,
but that would not help you any. Those things sound
well,
but they are shadowy and indefinite, like troy weight and
avoirdupois;
nobody knows what they mean. When you
buy a pound of a drug and the man asks you which
you
want, troy or avoirdupois, it is best to say "Yes," and shift
the subject.
They said that the wide space dates from the earliest sheep
and cattle-raising days.
People had to drive their stock long
distances—immense
journeys—from worn-out places to new
ones where were water and fresh
pasturage; and this wide
space had to be left in grass and unfenced, or the stock would
have starved to death in the transit.
On the way we saw the usual birds—the beautiful little
green parrots, the
magpie, and some others; and also the
slender native bird of modest plumage and the
eternally-forgetable
name—the bird that is the smartest among birds, and
can give a parrot
30 to 1 in the game and then talk him to
death. I cannot recall that bird's name. I
think it begins
with M. I wish it began with G. or something that a person
can
remember.
The magpie was out in great force, in the fields and on the
fences. He is a handsome
large creature, with snowy white
decorations, and is a singer; he has a murmurous rich
note that
is lovely. He was once modest, even diffident; but he lost all
that when
he found out that he was Australia's sole musical
bird. He has talent, and cuteness, and
impudence; and in his
tame state he is a most satisfactory pet—never coming
when
he is called, always coming when he isn't, and studying disobedience
as an accomplishment. He is not confined, but loafs
all over the house and
grounds, like the laughing jackass. I
think he learns to talk, I know he learns to sing tunes, and his
friends say that he
knows how to steal without learning. I
was acquainted with a tame magpie in Melbourne.
He had
lived in a lady's house several years, and believed he owned it.
The lady
had tamed him, and in return he had tamed the lady.
He was always on deck when not
wanted, always having his
own way, always tyrannizing over the dog, and always making
the cat's life a slow sorrow and a martyrdom. He knew a
number of tunes and could
sing them in perfect time and
tune; and would do it, too, at any time that silence was
wanted;
and then encore himself and do it again; but if he was asked
to sing he
would go out and take a walk.
It was long believed that fruit trees would not grow in that
baked and waterless plain
around Horsham, but the agricultural
college has dissipated that idea. Its ample nurseries were
producing oranges,
apricots, lemons, almonds, peaches, cherries,
48 varieties of apples—in fact,
all manner of fruits, and in
abundance. The trees did not seem to miss the water; they
were in vigorous and flourishing condition.
Experiments are made with different soils, to see what
things thrive best in them and
what climates are best for
them. A man who is ignorantly trying to produce upon his
farm things not suited to its soil and its other conditions can
make a journey to
the college from anywhere in Australia,
and go back with a change of scheme which will
make his farm
productive and profitable.
There were forty pupils there—a few of them farmers, relearning
their trade, the rest young men mainly from the
cities—novices. It
seemed a strange thing that an agricultural
college should have an attraction for city-bred youths,
but such is the fact. They
are good stuff, too; they are above
the agricultural average of intelligence, and they
come without
any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made
sacred by long descent.
The students work all day in the fields, the nurseries, and
the shearing-sheds,
learning and doing all the practical work of
the business—three days in a
week. On the other three they
study and hear lectures. They are taught the beginnings of
such sciences as bear upon agriculture—like chemistry, for
instance. We
saw the sophomore class in sheep-shearing shear
a dozen sheep. They did it by hand, not
with the machine.
The sheep was seized and flung down on his side and held
there;
and the students took off his coat with great celerity
and adroitness. Sometimes they
clipped off a sample of the
sheep, but that is customary with shearers, and they don't
mind
it; they don't even mind it as much as the sheep. They dab a
splotch of
sheep-dip on the place and go right ahead.
The coat of wool was unbelievably thick. Before the shearing
the sheep looked like the fat woman in the circus; after it
he looked like a
bench. He was clipped to the skin; and
smoothly and uniformly. The fleece comes from him
all in
one piece and has the spread of a blanket.
The college was flying the Australian flag—the gridiron of
England smuggled
up in the northwest corner of a big red
field that had the random stars of the Southern
Cross wandering
around over it.
From Horsham we went to Stawell. By rail. Still in the
colony of Victoria. Stawell is
in the gold-mining country.
In the bank-safe was half a peck of
surface-gold—gold dust,
grain gold; rich; pure in fact, and pleasant to sift
through
one's fingers; and would be pleasanter if it would stick. And
there were a
couple of gold bricks, very heavy to handle,
and worth $7,500 a piece. They were from a
very valuable
quartz mine; a lady owns two-thirds of it; she has an income
of
$75,000 a month from it, and is able to keep house.
The Stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has
great vineyards, and
produces exceptionally fine wines. One
of these vineyards—the Great Western,
owned by Mr. Irving
—is regarded as a model. Its product has reputation
abroad.
It yields a choice champagne and a fine claret, and its hock
took a prize
in France two or three years ago. The champagne
is kept in a maze of passages under
ground, cut in the rock, to
secure it an even temperature during the three-year term
required
to perfect it. In those vaults I saw 120,000 bottles of
champagne. The colony of
Victoria has a population of 1,000,000,
and those people
are said to drink 25,000,000 bottles of
THE THREE SISTERS.
champagne per year. The dryest community on the earth.The government has lately reduced the duty upon foreign
wines. That is one of the unkindnesses of Protection. A man
invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy
enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is
changed, and the man is robbed by his own government.
On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group
of boulders called the Three
Sisters—a curiosity oddly located;
for it was upon high ground, with the land
sloping away from
it, and no height above it from whence the boulders could have
rolled down. Relics of
an early ice-drift, perhaps. They are
noble boulders. One of them has the size and
smoothness and
plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern.
The road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and
scraggy and sorrowful. The
road was cream-white—a clayey
kind of earth, apparently. Along it toiled
occasional freight
wagons, drawn by long double files of oxen. Those wagons
were
going a journey of two hundred miles, I was told, and
were running a successful
opposition to the railway! The railways
are owned and run by the government.
Those sad gums stood up out of the dry white clay, pictures
of patience and
resignation. It is a tree that can get along
without water; still it is fond of
it—ravenously so. It is a
very intelligent tree and will detect the presence
of hidden
water at a distance of fifty feet, and send out slender long root-fibres
to prospect it. They will find it; and will also get at it
—even
through a cement wall six inches thick. Once a
cement water-pipe under ground at Stawell
began to gradually
reduce its output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver
water. Upon examining into the matter it was found stopped
up, wadded compactly with a
mass of root-fibres, delicate and
hair-like. How this stuff had gotten into the pipe was
a puzzle
for some little time; finally it was found that it had crept
in through a crack
that was almost invisible to the eye. A
gum tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and
was drinking
the water.
CHAPTER XXIV.
There is no such thing as "the Queen's English." The property has gone into
the hands
of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, in Australia, one has cloud-effects of an
unfamiliar sort. We had this kind of scenery, finely
staged, all the way to Ballarat.
Consequently we saw
more sky than country on that journey. At one time a great
stretch of the vault was densely flecked with wee ragged-edged
flakes of painfully white
cloud-stuff, all of one shape and size,
and equidistant apart, with narrow cracks of
adorable blue
showing between. The whole was suggestive of a hurricane of
snow-flakes drifting across the skies. By and by these flakes
fused themselves together
in interminable lines, with shady
faint hollows between the lines, the long
satin-surfaced
rollers following each other in simulated movement, and enchantingly
counterfeiting the majestic march of a flowing sea.
Later, the sea solidified
itself; then gradually broke up its
mass into innumerable lofty white pillars of about
one size, and
ranged these across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective,
in the similitude of a stupendous
colonnade—a mirage
without a doubt flung from the far Gates of the Hereafter.
The approaches to Ballarat were beautiful. The features,
great green expanses of
rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye-contenting
hedges of commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse
—and a lovely lake.
One must put in the pause, there, to
fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep
him from gliding
by without noticing the lake. One must notice it; for a
lovely lake is not as common a thing along the railways of
Australia as are the dry places. Ninety-two in the shade again,
but balmy and
comfortable, fresh and bracing. A perfect
climate.
Forty-five years ago the site now occupied by the City of
Ballarat was a sylvan
solitude as quiet as Eden and as lovely.
Nobody had ever heard of it. On the 25th of
August, 1851,
the first great gold-strike made in Australia was
made here.
The wandering prospectors who made it scraped up two pounds
and a half
of gold the first day—worth $600. A few days
later the place was a
hive—a town. The news of the strike
spread everywhere in a sort of
instantaneous way—spread
like a flash to the very ends of the earth. A
celebrity so
prompt and so universal has hardly been paralleled in history,
perhaps. It was as if the name BALLARAT had suddenly
been written on the sky, where all
the world could read it at
once.
The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South
Wales three months before had
already started emigrants
toward Australia; they had been coming as a stream, but they
came as a flood, now. A hundred thousand people poured into
Melbourne from England
and other countries in a single
month, and flocked away to the mines. The crews of the
ships
that brought them flocked with them; the clerks in the government
offices followed; so did the cooks, the maids, the
coachmen, the butlers, and the
other domestic servants; so did
the carpenters, the smiths, the plumbers, the painters,
the reporters,
the editors, the lawyers, the clients, the
barkeepers,
the bummers, the blacklegs, the thieves, the loose women, the
grocers,
the butchers, the bakers, the doctors, the druggists,
the nurses; so did the police;
even officials of high and
hitherto envied place threw up their positions and joined the
procession. This roaring avalanche swept out of Melbourne
and left it desolate,
Sunday-like, paralyzed, everything at a
stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor, all signs of life departed,
all sounds stilled save the rasping of the cloud-shadows
as they
scraped across the vacant streets.
That grassy and leafy paradise at Ballarat was soon ripped
open, and lacerated and
scarified and gutted, in the feverish
search for its hidden riches. There is nothing
like surface-mining
to snatch the graces and beauties and benignities out of
a paradise, and make an
odious and repulsive spectacle of it.
What fortunes were made! Immigrants got rich while the
ship unloaded and
reloaded—and went back home for good in
the same cabin they had come out in!
Not all of them. Only
some. I saw the others in Ballarat myself, forty-five years
later—what were left of them by time and death and the disposition
to rove. They were young and gay, then; they are
patriarchal and grave, now; and
they do not get excited any
more. They talk of the Past. They live in it. Their life is
a
dream, a retrospection.
Ballarat was a great region for "nuggets." No such nuggets
were found in California as Ballarat produced. In fact,
the Ballarat region has
yielded the largest ones known to
history. Two of them weighed about 180 pounds each,
and
together were worth $90,000. They were offered to any poor
person who would
shoulder them and carry them away. Gold
was so plentiful that it made people liberal
like that.
Ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days.
Everybody was happy, for a
time, and apparently prosperous.
Then came trouble. The government swooped down with a
mining tax. And in its worst form, too; for it was not a tax
upon what the miner
had taken out, but upon what he was
going to take out—if he could find it. It was a
license-tax—
license to work his claim—and it had to be paid
before he
could begin digging.
Consider the situation. No business is so uncertain as
surface-mining. Your claim may be good, and it may be
worthless. It may make you well
off in a month; and then
again you may have to dig and slave for half a year, at heavy
expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not there in
cost-paying
quantity, and that your time and your hard work
have been thrown away. It might be wise
policy to advance
the miner a monthly sum to encourage him to develop the
country's riches; but to tax him monthly in advance instead—
why, such a
thing was never dreamed of in America. There,
neither the claim itself nor its products,
howsoever rich or
poor, were taxed.
The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained—it
was of no use; the
government held its ground, and went on
collecting the tax. And not by pleasant methods,
but by ways
which must have been very galling to free people. The
rumblings of a
coming storm began to be audible.
By and by there was a result; and I think it may be called
the finest thing in
Australasian history. It was a revolution—
small in size, but great
politically; it was a strike for liberty, a
struggle for a principle, a stand against
injustice and oppression.
It was the Barons and John,
over again; it was Hampden
and Ship-Money; it was Concord and Lexington; small
beginnings, all of them, but
all of them great in political
results, all of them epoch-making. It is another instance
of a
victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honorable page to
history; the
people know it and are proud of it. They keep
green the memory of the men who fell at
the Eureka Stockade,
and Peter Lalor has his monument.
The surface-soil of Ballarat was full of gold. This soil the
miners ripped and tore
and trenched and harried and disembowled,
and made it
yield up its immense treasure. Then they
went down into the earth with deep shafts,
seeking the gravelly
beds of ancient rivers and brooks—and found them. They
followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them, sending
the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing
out of it its enormous
deposits of gold. The next biggest of
the two monster nuggets mentioned above came from
an old
river-channel 180 feet under ground.
Finally the quartz lodes were attacked. That is not poorman's
mining. Quartz-mining and milling require capital, and
staying-power, and
patience. Big companies were formed,
and for several decades, now, the lodes have been
successfully
worked, and have yielded great wealth. Since the gold discovery
in 1853 the Ballarat mines—taking the three kinds of
mining
together—have contributed to the world's pocket
something over three hundred millions of dollars, which is to
say that this nearly
invisible little spot on the earth's surface
has yielded about one-fourth as much gold
in forty-four years
as all California has yielded in forty-seven. The Californian
aggregate, from 1848 to 1895, inclusive, as reported by the
Statistician of the United
States Mint, is $1,265,217,217.
A citizen told me a curious thing about those mines. With
all my experience of mining
I had never heard of anything of
the sort before. The main gold reef runs about north
and
south—of course—for that is the custom of a rich gold reef.
At Ballarat its course is between walls of slate. Now the
citizen told me that
throughout a stretch of twelve miles along
the reef, the reef is crossed at intervals by
a straight black
streak of a carbonaceous nature—a streak in the slate; a
streak no thicker than a pencil—and that wherever it crosses
the reef
you will certainly find gold at the junction. It is
called the Indicator. Thirty feet on
each side of the Indicator
(and down in the slate, of course) is a
still finer streak—a
streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that is its
name—
Pencil Mark. Whenever you find the Pencil Mark you know
that
thirty feet from it is the Indicator; you measure the distance,
BALLARAT STATUARY.
excavate, find the Indicator, trace it straight to the
reef, and sink your shaft; your fortune is made, for certain.
If that is true, it is curious. And it is curious any way.
Ballarat is a town of only 40,000 population; and yet, since
it is in Australia, it
has every essential of an advanced and
enlightened big city. This is pure matter of
course. I must
stop dwelling upon these things. It is hard to keep from
dwelling
upon them, though; for it is difficult to get away from
the surprise of it. I will let
the other details go, this time, but
I must allow myself to mention that this little
town has a park
of 326 acres; a flower garden of 83 acres, with an elaborate
and
expensive fernery in it and some costly and unusually fine
statuary; and an artificial
lake covering 600 acres, equipped
with a fleet of 200 shells, small sail boats, and
little steam
yachts.
At this point I strike out some other praiseful things which
I was tempted to add. I
do not strike them out because they
were not true or not well said, but because I find
them better
said by another man—and a man more competent to testify,
too, because he belongs on the ground, and knows. I clip them
from a chatty speech
delivered some years ago by Mr. William
Little, who was at that time mayor of Ballarat:
"The language of our citizens, in this as in other parts of Australasia, is
mostly
healthy Anglo-Saxon, free from Americanisms, vulgarisms, and the
conflicting dialects of
our Fatherland, and is pure enough to suit a Trench or
a Latham. Our youth, aided by
climatic influence, are in point of physique
and comeliness unsurpassed in the Sunny
South. Our young men are well
ordered; and our maidens, 'not stepping over the bounds of
modesty,' are as
fair as Psyches, dispensing smiles as charming as November flowers."
The closing clause has the seeming of a rather frosty compliment,
but that is apparent only, not real. November is
summer-time
there.
His compliment to the local purity of the language is warranted.
It is quite free from impurities; this is acknowledged
far and wide. As in the German Empire all cultivated people
claim to speak Hanovarian
German, so in Australasia all cultivated
people claim to speak Ballarat English. Even in England
this cult has made considerable progress, and now that it
is favored by the two
great Universities, the time is not far
away when Ballarat English will come into
general use among
the educated classes of Great Britain at large. Its great merit
is, that it is shorter than ordinary Englishmdash;that is, it is more
compressed. At
first you have some difficulty in understanding
it when it is spoken as rapidly as the orator whom I have
quoted speaks it. An
illustration will show what I mean.
When he called and I handed him a chair, he bowed and said:
"Q."
Presently, when we were lighting our cigars, he held a
match to mine and I said:
"Thank you," and he said:
"Km."
Then I saw. Q is the end of the phrase "I thank you"
Km is the end of the phrase "You
are welcome." Mr. Little
puts no emphasis upon either of them, but delivers them so
reduced that they hardly have a sound. All Ballarat English
is like that, and the
effect is very soft and pleasant; it takes
all the hardness and harshness out of our
tongue and gives to
it a delicate whispery and vanishing cadence which charms the
ear like the faint rustling of the forest leaves.
"DO YOU REMEMBER THAT TRIP?"
CHAPTER XXV.
"Classie." A book which people praise and don't read.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
the rail again—bound for Bendigo. From diary:
October 23. Got up at 6, left at 7.30; soon reached
Castlemaine,
one of the rich gold-fields of the early
days; waited several hours for a train; left at
3.40 and reached
Bendigo in an hour. For comrade, a Catholic priest who was
better
than I was, but didn't seem to know it—a man full of
graces of the heart, the
mind, and the spirit; a lovable man.
He will rise. He will be a bishop some day. Later
an Archbishop.
Later a Cardinal. Finally an Archangel, I
hope.
And then he will recall me when I say, "Do you remember
that trip we made
from Ballarat to Bendigo, when you were
nothing but Father C., and I was nothing to what
I am now?"
It has actually taken nine hours to come from Ballarat to
Bendigo. We
could have saved seven by walking. However,
there was no hurry.
Bendigo was another of the rich strikes of the early days.
It does a great
quartz-mining business, now—that business
which, more than any other that I
know of, teaches patience,
and requires grit and a steady nerve. The town is full of
towering chimney-stacks, and hoisting-works, and looks like a
petroleum-city.
Speaking of patience; for example, one of
the local companies went steadily on with its
deep borings and
searchings without show of gold or a penny of reward for
eleven years—then struck it, and became suddenly rich. The
eleven years' work had cost $55,000, and the first gold found
was a grain the size of a pin's head. It is kept under locks
and bars, as a precious
thing, and is reverently shown to the
visitor, "hats off." When I saw it I had not heard
its history.
"It is gold. Examine it—take the glass. Now how much
should you say it is
worth?"
I said—
"I should say about two cents; or in your English dialect,
four farthings."
"Well, it cost £11,000."
"Oh, come!"
"Yes, it did. Ballarat and Bendigo have produced the
three monumental nuggets of the
world, and this one is the
monumentalest one of the three. The other two represent
£9,000 a piece; this one a couple of thousand more. It is
small, and not much
to look at, but it is entitled to it name—
Adam. It is the Adam-nugget of
this mine, and its children
run up into the millions."
Speaking of patience again, another of the mines was
worked, under heavy expenses,
during 17 years before pay
was struck, and still another one compelled a wait of 21
years
before pay was struck; then, in both instances, the outlay was
all back in a
year or two, with compound interest.
Bendigo has turned out even more gold than Ballarat.
The two together have produced $650,000,000 worth—which
is half as much as
California has produced.
It was through Mr. Blank—not to go into particulars
about his
name—it was mainly through Mr. Blank that my
stay in Bendigo was made
memorably pleasant and interesting.
He explained this to me himself. He told me that it
was
through his influence that the city government invited me to
the town-hall to
hear complimentary speeches and respond to
them; that it was through his influence that
I had been taken
on a long pleasure-drive through the city and shown its nota-
ble features; that it was through his influence that I was
invited to visit the great
mines; that it was through his influence
that I was taken to the hospital and allowed to see the
convalescent Chinaman who
had been
attacked at midnight in his lonely hut
eight weeks before by robbers, and
stabbed forty-six times and scalped besides;
that it
was through his influence
that when I arrived this awful
spectacle of piecings and patchings and
bandagings was sitting up in his cot
letting on to read one of my books;
that it
was through his influence that
efforts had been made to get the
Catholic
Archbishop of Bendigo to
invite me to dinner; that it was through his influence that
efforts had been made to get the Anglican Bishop of Bendigo
ALL THROUGH HIS INFLUENCE.
to ask me to supper; that it was through his influence that
the dean of the editorial fraternity had driven me through the
woodsy outlying country and shown me, from the summit of
Lone Tree Hill, the mightiest and loveliest expanse of forest-clad
mountain and valley that I had seen in all Australia.
And when he asked me what had most impressed me in
Bendigo and I answered and said it was the taste and the
public spirit which had adorned the streets with 105 miles
of shade trees, he said that it was through his influence that it
had been done.
But I am not representing him quite correctly. He did not
say it was through his influence that all these things had
happened—for that would have been coarse; he merely
conveyed
that idea; conveyed it so subtly that I only caught it
fleetingly, as one catches
vagrant faint breaths of perfume
when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it
without offense and without any suggestion of egoism or
ostentation—but
conveyed it, nevertheless.
He was an Irishman; an educated gentleman; grave, and
kindly, and courteous; a
bachelor, and about forty-five or
possibly fifty years old, apparently. He called upon
me at the
hotel, and it was there that we had this talk. He made me like
him, and
did it without trouble. This was partly through his
winning and gentle ways, but mainly
through the amazing
familiarity with my books which his conversation showed.
He
was down to date with them, too; and if he had made
them the study of his life he could
hardly have been better
posted as to their contents than he was. He made me better
satisfied with myself than I had ever been before. It was
plain that he had a deep
fondness for humor, yet he never
laughed; he never even chuckled; in fact, humor could
not
win to outward expression on his face at all. No, he
was always
grave—tenderly, pensively grave; but he made me
laugh, all along; and this was very trying—and very pleasant
at the same time—for it was at quotations from my own books.
When he was going, he turned and said—
"You don't remember me?"
"I? Why, no. Have we met before?"
"No, it was a matter of correspondence."
"Correspondence?"
"Yes, many years ago. Twelve or fifteen. Oh, longer
than that. But of course
you—" A musing pause. Then
he said—
"Do you remember Corrigan Castle?"
"N-no, I believe I don't. I don't seem to recall the name."
He waited a moment, pondering, with the door-knob in his
hand, then started out; but
turned back and said that I had
once been interested in Corrigan Castle, and asked me if
I
would go with him to his quarters in the evening and take a
hot Scotch and talk
it over. I was a teetotaler and liked
relaxation, so I said I would.
We drove from the lecture-hall together about half-past
ten. He had a most comfortably
and tastefully furnished
parlor, with good pictures on the walls, Indian and Japanese
ornaments on the mantel, and here and there, and books everywhere—largely
mine; which made me proud. The light was
brilliant, the easy chairs were
deep-cushioned, the arrangements
for brewing and smoking were all there. We brewed and
lit up; then he passed a sheet of note-paper to me and said—
"Do you remember that?"
"Oh, yes, indeed!"
The paper was of a sumptuous quality. At the top was a
twisted and interlaced monogram
printed from steel dies in
gold and blue and red, in the ornate English fashion of long
years ago; and under it, in neat gothic capitals was this—
printed in
blue:
Corrigan Castle
187
"My!" said I, "how did you come by this?"
"I was President of it."
"No!—you don't mean it."
"It is true. I was its first President. I was re-elected
annually as long as its
meetings were held in my castle—
Corrigan—which was five years."
Then he showed me an album with twenty-three photographs
of me in it. Five of them were of old dates, the
others of various later crops;
the list closed with a picture
taken by Falk in Sydney a month before.
"You sent us the first five; the rest were bought."
This was paradise! We ran late, and talked, talked, talked—
subject, the
Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle, Ireland.
My first knowledge of that Club dates away back; all of
twenty years, I should say. It
came to me in the form of a
courteous letter, written on the note-paper which I have
described, and signed "By order of the President; C. ,
Secretary." It conveyed the fact that the Club had been created
in my honor, and added the hope that this token of
appreciation of my work would
meet with my approval.
I answered, with thanks; and did what I could to keep my
gratification from
over-exposure.
It was then that the long correspondence began. A letter
came back, by order of the
President, furnishing me the names
of the members—thirty-two in number. With
it came a copy
of the Constitution and By-Laws, in pamphlet form, and artistically
printed. The initiation fee and dues were in their
proper place; also, schedule of
meetings—monthly—for essays
upon works of mine, followed by
discussions; quarterly for business
and a supper, without essays, but with after-supper speeches
also, there was a list of the officers: President, Vice-President,
Secretary,
Treasurer, etc. The letter was brief, but it was
pleasant reading, for it told me about
the strong interest which
the membership took in their new venture, etc., etc. It also
asked me for a photograph—a special one. I went down and
sat for it and
sent it—with a letter, of course.
Presently came the badge of the Club, and very dainty and
and pretty it was; and very
artistic. It was a frog peeping
out from a graceful tangle of grass-sprays and rushes,
and was done in enamels on
a gold basis, and had a gold
pin back of it. After I had petted it, and
played
with it, and caressed it, and enjoyed
it a couple of hours, the light happened to
fall upon it at a new angle, and revealed to
me a cunning new detail; with the light
just
right, certain delicate shadings of the grass-blades
and rush-stems wove themselves into
a monogram—mine! You can see that
that
jewel was a work of art. And when you come to consider
the intrinsic value of
it, you must concede that it is not every
literary club that could afford a badge like
that. It was
easily worth $75, in the opinion of Messrs. Marcus and Ward
of New
York. They said they could not duplicate it for that
and make a profit.
THE CLUB BADGE.
By this time the Club was well under way; and from that
time forth its secretary kept
my off-hours well supplied with
business. He reported the Club's discussions of my books
with
laborious fullness, and did his work with great spirit and ability.
As a
rule, he synopsized; but when a speech was especially
brilliant, he short-handed it and
gave me the best passages
from it, written out. There were five speakers whom he particularly
favored in that way: Palmer, Forbes, Naylor, Norris,
and Calder. Palmer and Forbes
could never get through a
speech without attacking each other, and each in his own way
was formidably effective—Palmer in virile and eloquent abuse,
Forbes in courtly and elegant but scalding satire. I could
always tell which of them was talking without looking for his
name. Naylor had a polished style and a happy knack at
felicitous metaphor; Norris's style was wholly without ornament,
but enviably compact, lucid, and strong. But after all,
Calder was the gem. He never spoke when sober, he spoke
continuously when he wasn't. And certainly they were the
drunkest speeches that a man ever uttered. They were full of
good things, but so incredibly mixed up and wandering that it
made one's head swim to follow him. They were not intended
to be funny, but they were,—funny for the very gravity
which the speaker put into his flowing miracles of incongruity.
In the course of five years I came to know the styles of the
five orators as well as I knew the style of any speaker in my
own club at home.
These reports came every month. They were written on
foolscap, 600 words to the page,
and usually about twenty-five
pages in a report—a good 15,000 words, I should
say,—a solid
week's work. The reports were absorbingly entertaining, long
as they were; but, unfortunately for me, they did not come
alone. They were always
accompanied by a lot of questions
about passages and purposes in my books, which the
Club
wanted answered; and additionally accompanied every quarter
by the
Treasurer's report, and the Auditor's report, and the
Committee's report, and the
President's review, and my opinion
of these was always desired; also suggestions for the
good of
the Club, if any occurred to me.
By and by I came to dread those things; and this dread
grew and grew and grew; grew
until I got to anticipating
them with a cold horror. For I was an indolent man, and not
fond of letter-writing, and whenever these things came I had
to put everything by and sit down—for my own peace of
mind—and
dig and dig until I got something out of my head
which would answer for a reply. I got
along fairly well the
first year; but for the succeeding four years the Mark Twain
Club of Corrigan Castle was my curse, my nightmare, the
grief and misery of my life. And
I got so, so sick of sitting
for photographs. I sat every year
for five years, trying to
satisfy that insatiable organization. Then at last I rose in
revolt. I could endure my oppressions no longer. I pulled
my fortitude together
and tore off my chains, and was a free
man again, and happy. From that day I burned the
secretary's
fat envelopes the moment they arrived, and by and by they
ceased to come.
Well, in the sociable frankness of that night in Bendigo
I brought this all out in
full confession. Then Mr. Blank
came out in the same frank way, and with a preliminary
word
of gentle apology said that he was the Mark Twain Club, and
the only member it had ever had!
Why, it was matter for anger, but I didn't feel any. He
said he never had to work for
a living, and that by the time
he was thirty life had become a bore and a weariness to
him.
He had no interests left; they had paled and perished, one by
one, and left
him desolate. He had begun to think of suicide.
Then all of a sudden he thought of that
happy idea of starting
an imaginary club, and went straightway to work at it, with
enthusiasm and love. He was charmed with it; it gave him
something to do. It elaborated
itself on his hands; it became
twenty times more complex and formidable than was his
first
rude draft of it. Every new addition to his original plan
which cropped up
in his mind gave him a fresh interest and a
new pleasure. He designed the Club badge
himself, and
worked over it, altering and improving it, a number of days
and
nights; then sent to London and had it made. It was the
only one that was made. It was made for me; the "rest of
the Club" went without.
He invented the thirty-two members and their names. He
invented the five favorite
speakers and their five separate styles.
He invented their speeches, and reported them
himself. He
would have kept that Club going until now, if I hadn't deserted,
he said. He said he worked like a slave over those
reports;
each of them cost him from a week to a fortnight's work, and
the work
gave him pleasure and kept him alive and willing to
be alive. It was a bitter blow to
him when the Club died.
Finally, there wasn't any Corrigan Castle. He had invented
that, too.
It was wonderful—the whole thing; and altogether the
most ingenious and
laborious and cheerful and painstaking
practical joke I have ever heard of. And I liked
it; liked to
hear him tell about it; yet I have been a hater of practical
jokes
from as long back as I can remember. Finally he said—
"Do you remember a note from Melbourne fourteen or fifteen
years ago, telling about your lecture tour in Australia,
and your death and burial
in Melbourne?—a note from Henry
Bascomb, of Bascomb Hall, Upper Holywell
Hants."
"Yes."
"I wrote it."
"M-y—word!"
"Yes, I did it. I don't know why. I just took the notion,
and carried it out without
stopping to think. It was wrong.
It could have done harm. I was always sorry about it
afterward.
You must forgive me. I was Mr. Bascom's guest
on his yacht, on his voyage around the world. He often spoke
of you, and of the
pleasant times you had had together in his
home; and the notion took me, there in
Melbourne, and I
imitated his hand, and wrote the letter."
So the mystery was cleared up, after so many, many years.
CHAPTER XXVI.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one! keep from telling
their happinesses to the unhappy.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
visits to Maryborough and some other Australian
towns, we presently took passage for New Zealand.
If it would not look too much like
showing off, I would
tell the reader where New Zealand is; for he is as I was; he
thinks he knows. And he thinks he knows where Hertzegovina
is; and how to pronounce pariah; and how to use the word
unique without exposing himself to the derision of the dictionary.
But in truth, he knows none of these things. There are but four
or five people in
the world who possess this knowledge, and
these make their living out of it. They travel
from place to
place, visiting literary assemblages, geographical societies, and
seats of learning, and springing sudden bets that these people
do not know these things.
Since all people think they know
them, they are an easy prey to these adventurers. Or
rather
they were an easy prey until the law interfered three months
ago, and a New
York court decided that this kind of gambling
is illegal, "because it traverses Article
IV, Section 9, of the
Constitution of the United States, which forbids betting on a
sure thing." This decision was rendered by the full Bench of
the New York Supreme
Court, after a test sprung upon the
court by counsel for the prosecution, which showed
that none of
the nine Judges was able to answer any of the four questions.
All people think that New Zealand is close to Australia or
Asia, or somewhere, and that you cross to it on a bridge. But
that is not so. It is not close to anything, but lies by itself,
out in the water. It is nearest to Australia, but still not near.
The gap between is very wide. It will be a surprise to the
reader, as it was to me, to learn that the distance from Australia
to New Zealand is really twelve or thirteen hundred
miles, and that there is no bridge. I learned this from Professor
X., of Yale University, whom I met in the steamer on the
great lakes when I was crossing the continent to sail across the
Pacific. I asked him about New Zealand, in order to make
conversation. I supposed he would generalize a little without
compromising himself, and then turn the subject to something
he was acquainted with, and my object would then be attained;
the ice would be broken, and we could go smoothly on, and get
acquainted, and have a pleasant time. But, to my surprise, he
was not only not embarrassed by my question, but seemed to
welcome it, and to take a distinct interest in it. He began to
talk—fluently, confidently, comfortably; and as he talked, my
admiration grew and grew; for as the subject developed under
his hands, I saw that he not only knew where New Zealand
was, but that he was minutely familiar with every detail of its
history, politics, religions, and commerce, its fauna, flora, geology,
products, and climatic peculiarities. When he was done,
I was lost in wonder and admiration, and said to myself, he
know severything; in the domain of human knowledge he is king.
I wanted to see him do more miracles; and so, just for the
pleasure of hearing him
answer, I asked him about Hertzegovina,
and pariah, and
unique. But he began to generalize
then, and show distress. I saw that with New Zealand
gone,
he was a Samson shorn of his locks; he was as other men.
This was a curious
and interesting mystery, and I was frank
with him, and asked him to explain it.
He tried to avoid it at first; but then laughed and said
that after all, the matter was not worth concealment, so he
would let me into the secret. In substance, this is his story:
"Last autumn I was at work one morning at home, when a card came
up—the
card of a stranger. Under the name was printed a line which
showed that this visitor was
Professor of Theological Engineering in Wellington
University, New Zealand. I was troubled—troubled, I mean, by the
shortness of the notice. College etiquette required that he be at once invited
to dinner
by some member of the Faculty—invited to dine on that
day—not
put off till a subsequent day. I did not quite know what to do.
College
etiquette requires, in the case of a foreign guest, that the dinner-talk shall
begin with complimentary
references to his country,
its great men, its
services
to civilization, its seats of
learning, and things like
that; and
of course the
host is responsible, and
must either begin this talk
himself
or see that it is
done by some one else. I
was in great difficulty; and
the
more I searched my
memory, the more my
trouble grew. I found
that I knew
nothing about
New Zealand. I thought
I knew where it was, and
that was all.
I had an
impression that it was
close to Australia, or Asia,
or somewhere,
and that
one went over to it on a
bridge. This might turn
out to be
incorrect; and
even if correct, it would
not furnish matter enough
for the
purpose at the dinner, and I should expose my College to shame
before my guest; he would
see that I, a member of the Faculty of the first
University in America, was wholly
ignorant of his country, and he would go
away and tell this, and laugh at it. The
thought of it made my face burn.
THE SCHEME WORKED.
"I sent for my wife and told her how I was situated, and asked for her
help, and she
thought of a thing which I might have thought of myself, if I
had not been excited and
worried. She said she would go and tell the visitor
that I was out but would be in in a
few minutes; and she would talk, and
keep him busy while I got out the back way and
hurried over and make
Professor Lawson give the dinner. For Lawson knew everything, and
could meet the guest in a creditable way and save the reputation of the
University. I ran to Lawson, but was disappointed. He did not know anything
about New Zealand. He said that, as far as his recollection went
it was close to Australia, or Asia, or somewhere, and you
go over to it on a bridge; but that was all he knew. It
was too bad. Lawson was a perfect encyclopedia of
abstruse learning; but now in this hour of our need,
it turned out that he did not know any useful thing.
"WHAT DO YOU?"
"We consulted. He saw that the reputation of the
University was in very real peril,
and he walked the floor
in anxiety, talking, and trying to think out some way
to
meet the difficulty. Presently he decided that we
must try the rest of the
Faculty—some of them might
know about New Zealand. So we went to the
telephone
and called up the professor of astronomy and asked him,
and he said that
all he knew was, that it was close to
Australia, or Asia, or somewhere, and you went
over to
it on—
"We shut him off and called up the professor of
biology, and he said that all he knew
was that it was
close to Aus.—
"We shut him off, and sat down, worried and disheartened,
to see if we could think up some other scheme. We shortly hit
upon one which
promised well, and this one we adopted, and set its machinery
going at once. It was this. Lawson must give the dinner. The
Faculty must be
notified by telephone to prepare. We must all get to work
diligently, and at the end of
eight hours and a half we must come to dinner
acquainted with New Zealand; at least well
enough informed
to appear without discredit before this native. To
seem properly intelligent we
should have to know about
New Zealand's population, and politics, and form of government,
and commerce, and taxes, and products, and
ancient
history, and modern history, and varieties of religion, and
nature of the
laws, and their codification, and amount of
revenue, and whence drawn, and methods of
collection, and
percentage of loss, and character of climate, and—well, a
lot of things like that; we must suck the maps and cyclopedias
dry. And while we posted up in this way, the
Faculty's wives must flock over, one
after the other, in a
studiedly casual way, and help my wife keep the New
Zealander quiet, and not let him get out and come interfering
with our studies. The scheme worked admirably; but
it stopped business, stopped it
entirely.
"CLOSE TO AUS-."
"It is in the official log-book of Yale, to be read and
wondered at by future
generations—the account of the
Great Blank Day—the memorable Blank
Day—the day
wherein the wheels of culture were stopped, a Sunday silence
prevailed
all about, and the whole University stood still while the Faculty read-up
and qualified itself to sit at meat, 'without shame, in the presence of the
Professor of Theological Engineering from New Zealand.
"When we assembled at the dinner we were miserably tired and worn—
but we
were posted. Yes, it is fair to claim that. In fact, erudition is a
pale name for it.
New Zealand was the only subject; and it was just beautiful
to hear us ripple it out. And with such an air of unembarrassed ease,
and
unostentatious familiarity with detail, and trained and seasoned mastery
of the
subject—and oh, the grace and fluency of it!
HE LOOKED DAZED.
"Well, finally somebody happened to notice that the guest was looking
dazed, and
wasn't saying anything. So they stirred him up, of course. Then
that man came out with a
good,
honest, eloquent compliment
that made the Faculty blush.
He said he
was not worthy to
sit in the company of men like
these; that he had been silent
from admiration; that he had
been silent from another cause
also—silent from shame—
silent from ignorance! 'For,'
said he, 'I, who have lived eighteen
years in New Zealand and
have served five in a professorship,
and ought to know much
about that country, perceive,
now, that I know almost nothing
about it. I say it with shame,
that I have learned
fifty times,
yes, a hundred times more about
New Zealand in these two hours
at this table than I ever knew
before in all the eighteen years
put together. I
was silent because
I could not help myself.
What I knew about taxes, and
policies, and laws,
and revenue,
and products, and history, and all that multitude of things, was but
general,
and ordinary, and vague—unscientific, in a word—and it
would have been
insanity to expose it here to the searching glare of your amazingly
accurate
and all-comprehensive knowledge of those matters, gentlemen. I beg you to
let me sit silent—as becomes me. But do not change the subject; I can at
least follow you, in this one; whereas if you change to one which shall call
out the
full strength of your mighty erudition, I shall be as one lost. If
you know all this
about a remote little inconsequent patch like New Zealand,
ah, what wouldn't you know about any other subject!'
CHAPTER XXVII.
Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there
is of it.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
1—noon. A fine day, a
brilliant sun.
Warm in the sun, cold in the shade—an icy breeze
blowing
out of the south. A solemn long swell
rolling up northward. It comes from the South
Pole, with
nothing in the way to obstruct its march and tone its energy
down. I
have read somewhere that an acute observer among
the early explorers—Cook? or
Tasman?—accepted this
majestic swell as trustworthy circumstantial evidence
that no
important land lay to the southward, and so did not waste
time on a
useless quest in that direction, but changed his
course and went searching elsewhere.
Afternoon. Passing between Tasmania (formerly Van
Diemen's Land) and neighboring islands—islands whence the
poor
exiled Tasmanian savages used to gaze at their lost homeland
and cry; and die of broken hearts. How glad I am that
all these native races are
dead and gone, or nearly so. The
work was mercifully swift and horrible in some portions
of
Australia. As far as Tasmania is concerned, the extermination
was complete: not
a native is left. It was a strife of years, and
decades of years. The Whites and the
Blacks hunted each
other, ambushed each other, butchered each other. The Blacks
were not numerous. But they were wary, alert, cunning, and
GOVERNOR'S PROCLAMATION.
they knew their country well. They lasted a long time, few
as they were, and inflicted
much slaughter upon the Whites.
The Government wanted to save the Blacks from ultimate
extermination, if possible. One
of its schemes was to capture
them and coop them up, on a neighboring island, under
guard.
Bodies of Whites volunteered for the hunt, for the pay was
good—£5 for each Black captured and delivered, but the
success
achieved was not very satisfactory. The Black was
naked, and his body was greased. It
was hard to get a grip
on him that would hold. The Whites moved about in armed
bodies, and surprised little families of natives, and did make
captures; but it was
suspected that in these surprises half a
dozen natives were killed to one
caught—and that was not
what the Government desired.
Another scheme was to drive the natives into a corner of
the island and fence them in
by a cordon of men placed in line
across the country; but the natives managed to slip
through,
constantly, and continue their murders and arsons.
The governor warned these unlettered savages by printed
proclamation that they must stay in the desolate region
officially appointed for
them! The proclamation was a dead
letter; the savages could not read it. Afterward a picture-
proclamation was issued. It was painted up on boards, and these
were nailed to
trees in the forest. Herewith is a photographic
reproduction of this fashion-plate.
Substantially it means:
Upon its several schemes the Government spent £30,000
and employed the
labors and ingenuities of several thousand
Whites for a long time—with
failure as a result. Then, at
last, a quarter of a century after the beginning of the
troubles
between the two races, the right man was found. No, he
found himself. This was George Augustus Robinson, called
in history "The Conciliator."
He was not educated, and not
conspicuous in any way. He was a working bricklayer, in
Hobart Town. But he must have been an amazing personality;
a man worth traveling
far to see. It may be his counterpart
appears in history, but I do not know where to
look for it.
He set himself this incredible task: to go out into the
wilderness, the jungle, and
the mountain-retreats where the
hunted and implacable savages were hidden, and appear
among
them unarmed, speak the language of love and of kindness to
them, and
persuade them to forsake their homes and the wild
free life that was so dear to them,
and go with him and
surrender to the hated Whites and live under their watch and
ward, and upon their charity the rest of their lives! On its
face it was the dream of a
madman.
In the beginning, his moral-suasion project was sarcastically
dubbed the sugar-plum speculation. If the scheme was
striking, and new to the world's experience, the situation was
not less so. It was this.
The White population numbered
40,000 in 1831; the Black population numbered three hundred.
Not 300 warriors, but 300 men, women, and children. The
Whites were armed with
guns, the Blacks with clubs and
spears. The Whites had fought the Blacks for a quarter
of a
century, and had tried every thinkable way to capture, kill, or
subdue them;
and could not do it. If white men of any
race could have done it,
these would have accomplished it.
But every scheme had failed, the splendid 300, the
matchless
300 were unconquered, and manifestly unconquerable. They
would not
yield, they would listen to no terms, they would
fight to the bitter end. Yet they had
no poet to keep up their
heart, and sing the marvel of their magnificent patriotism.
At the end of five-and-twenty years of hard fighting, the
surviving 300 naked patriots
were still defiant, still persistent,
still efficacious with their rude weapons, and the Governor and
the 40,000 knew not
which way to turn, nor what to do.
Then the Bricklayer—that wonderful man—proposed to
go out into
the wilderness, with no weapon but his tongue,
and no protection but his honest eye and
his humane heart;
and track those embittered savages to their lairs in the gloomy
forests and among the mountain snows. Naturally, he was
considered a crank. But he was
not quite that. In fact, he
was a good way short of that. He was building upon his long
and intimate knowledge of the native character. The deriders
of his project were
right—from their standpoint—for they
believed the natives to be
mere wild beasts; and Robinson was
right, from his standpoint—for he believed
the natives to be
human beings. The truth did really lie between the two.
The
event proved that Robinson's judgment was soundest;
but about once a month for four
years the event came near
to giving the verdict to the deriders, for about that
frequently
Robinson barely escaped falling under the native spears.
But history shows that he had a thinking head, and was
not a mere wild sentimentalist.
For instance, he wanted the
war parties call in before he started unarmed upon his
mission
of peace. He wanted the best chance of success—not a half-chance.
And he was very willing to have help; and so,
high
rewards were advertised, for any who would go unarmed with
him. This
opportunity was declined. Robinson persuaded
some tamed natives of both sexes to go with
him—a strong
evidence of his persuasive powers, for those natives well knew
that their destruction would be almost certain. As it turned
out, they had to face
death over and over again.
Robinson and his little party had a difficult undertaking upon
their hands. They could
not ride off, horseback, comfortably
into the woods and call Leonidas and his 300
together for a
talk and a treaty the following day; for the wild men were
not in a body; they were scattered, immense distances apart,
over regions so desolate
that even the birds could not make a
living with the chances
offered—scattered in groups of twenty,
a dozen, half a dozen, even in groups
of three. And the mission
must go on foot. Mr. Bonwick furnishes a description of
those horrible regions,
whereby it will be seen that even
fugitive gangs of the hardiest and choicest human
devils the
world has seen—the convicts set apart to people the "Hell of
Macquarrie Harbor Station"—were never able, but once, to survive
the horrors of a march through them, but starving and
struggling, and fainting and
failing, ate each other, and died:
"Onward, still onward, was the order of the indomitable Robinson. No
one ignorant of
the western country of Tasmania can form a correct idea of the
traveling difficulties.
While I was resident in Hobart Town, the Governor,
Sir John Franklin, and his lady,
undertook the western journey to Macquarrie
Harbor, and suffered terribly. One man who
assisted to carry her ladyship
through the swamps, gave me his bitter experience of its
miseries. Several
were disabled for life. No wonder that but one party, escaping from
Macquarrie
Harbor convict settlement, arrived at the civilized region in safety.
Men perished
in the scrub, were lost in snow, or were devoured by their companions.
This was the territory traversed by Mr. Robinson and his Black
guides. All honor to his intrepidity, and their wonderful fidelity! When
they had, in
the depth of winter, to cross deep and rapid rivers, pass among
mountains six thousand
feet high, pierce dangerous thickets, and find food in
a country forsaken even by birds,
we can realize their hardships.
"After a frightful journey by Cradle Mountain, and over the lofty plateau
of Middlesex
Plains, the travelers experienced unwonted misery, and the
circumstances called forth
the best qualities of the nob'e little band. Mr.
Robinson wrote afterwards to Mr.
Secretary Burnett some details of this passage
of horrors. In that letter, of Oct 2, 1834, he states that his Natives
were very
reluctant to go over the dreadful mountain passes; that 'for seven
successive days we
continued traveling over one solid body of snow;' that
'the snows were of incredible
depth;' that 'the Natives were frequently up
to their middle in snow.' But still the
ill-clad, ill-fed, diseased, and wayworn
men and women were sustained by the cheerful
voice of their unconquerable
friend, and responded most nobly to his call."
Mr. Bonwick says that Robinson's friendly capture of the
Big River
tribe—remember, it was a whole tribe—"was by
far the grandest
feature of the war, and the crowning glory
of his efforts." The word "war" was not well
chosen, and is
misleading. There was war still, but only the Blacks were
conducting it—the Whites were holding off until Robinson
could give his
scheme a fair trial. I think that we are to
understand that the friendly capture of that
tribe was by far
the most important thing, the highest in value, that happened
during the whole thirty years of truceless hostilities; that it
was a decisive thing, a
peaceful Waterloo, the surrender of the
native Napoleon and his dreaded forces, the
happy ending of
the long strife. For "that tribe was the terror of the colony,"
its chief "the Black Douglas of Bush households."
Robinson knew that these formidable people were lurking
somewhere, in some remote
corner of the hideous regions just
described, and he and his unarmed little party
started on a
tedious and perilous hunt for them. At last, "there, under
the
shadows of the Frenchman's Cap, whose grim cone rose
five thousand feet in the
uninhabited westward interior," they
were found. It was a serious moment. Robinson
himself
believed, for once, that his mission, successful until now, was
to end
here in failure, and that his own death-hour had struck.
The redoubtable chief stood in menacing attitude, with
his eighteen-foot spear poised;
his warriors stood massed at
his back, armed for battle, their faces eloquent with their
long-cherished
loathing for white men. "They rattled their spears
and shouted their war-cry."
Their women were back of them,
laden with supplies of weapons, and keeping their 150
eager
dogs quiet until the chief should give the signal to fall on.
"I think we shall soon be in the resurrection," whispered a
member of Robinson's
little party.
"I think we shall," answered Robinson; then plucked up
heart and began his
persuasions—in the tribe's own dialect,
which surprised and pleased the
chief. Presently there was
an interruption by the chief:
"Who are you?"
"We are gentlemen."
"Where are your guns?"
"We have none."
The warrior was astonished.
"Where your little guns?" (pistols).
"We have none."
A few minutes passed—in by-play—suspense—discussion
among the tribesmen—Robinson's tamed squaws ventured to
cross the line and
begin persuasions upon the wild squaws.
Then the chief stepped back "to confer with the
old women—
the real arbiters of savage war." Mr. Bonwick continues:
"As the fallen gladiator in the arena looks for the signal of life or death
from the
president of the amphitheatre, so waited our friends in anxious suspense
while the conference continued. In a few minutes, before a word was
uttered, the
women of the tribe threw up their arms three times. This was
the inviolable sign of
peace! Down fell the spears. Forward, with a heavy
sigh of relief, and upward glance of
gratitude, came the friends of peace.
The impulsive natives rushed forth with tears and
cries, as each saw in the
other's rank a loved one of the past.…
"It was a jubilee of joy. A festival followed. And, while tears flowed
at the recital
of woe, a corrobory of pleasant laughter closed the eventful day."
In four years, without the spilling of a drop of blood,
Robinson brought them all in,
willing captives, and delivered
them to the white governor, and ended the war which
powder
and bullets, and thousands of men to use them, had prosecuted
without
result since 1804.
Marsyas charming the wild beasts with his music—that is
fable; but the
miracle wrought by Robinson is fact. It is
history—and authentic; and surely,
there is nothing greater,
nothing more reverence-compelling in the history of any
country, ancient or modern.
And in memory of the greatest man Australasia ever
developed or ever will develop,
there is a stately monument
to George Augustus Robinson, the Conciliator
in—no, it is to
another man, I forget his name.
However, Robertson's own generation honored him, and in
manifesting it honored
themselves. The Government gave
him a money-reward and a thousand acres of land; and the
people held mass-meetings and praised him and emphasized
their praise with a large subscription of money.
A good dramatic situation; but the curtain fell on another:
"When this desperate tribe was thus captured, there was much surprise
to find that the
£30,000 of a little earlier day had been spent, and the whole
population of
the colony placed under arms, in contention with an opposing
force of sixteen men with wooden spears! Yet such was the fact. The celebrated
Big River tribe, that had been raised by European fears to a host, consisted
of sixteen men, nine women, and one child. With a knowledge of
the
mischief done by these few, their wonderful marches and their widespread
aggressions, their enemies cannot deny to them the attributes of courage and
military
tact. A Wallace might harass a large army with a small and
determined band; but the
contending parties were at least equal in arms and
civilization The Zulus who fought us
in Africa, the Maories in New
Zealand, the Arabs in the Soudan, were far better provided
with weapons,
more advanced in the science of war, and considerably more numerous, than
the naked Tasmanians. Governor Arthur rightly termed them a noble
race."
These were indeed wonderful people, the natives. They
ought not to have been wasted.
They should have been
crossed with the Whites. It would have improved the Whites
and done the Natives no harm.
But the Natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures.
They
were gathered together in little settlements on neighboring
islands, and paternally cared for by the Government,
and instructed in religion,
and deprived of tobacco, because the
superintendent of the Sunday-school was not a
smoker, and so
considered smoking immoral.
The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular
hours, and church, and
school, and Sunday-school, and work, and
the other misplaced persecutions of
civilization, and they pined
for their lost home and their wild free life. Too late they
repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell. They
sat homesick on
their alien crags, and day by day gazed out
through their tears over the sea with
unappeasable longing
toward the hazy bulk which was the specter of what had been
their paradise; one by one their hearts broke and they died.
In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained
THE LAST OF HER RACE.
alive. A handful lingered along into age. In 1864 the last
man died, in 1876 the last woman died, and the Spartans of
Australasia were extinct.
The Whites always mean well when they take human fish
out of the ocean and try to make
them dry and warm and
happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted
white man can always be depended on to prove himself
inadequate when he deals with
savages. He cannot turn the
situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a
well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church
and his clothes and
his books and his choice food to a hideous
wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and
ice and sleet and
storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering
for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to eat but
snakes and grubs and
offal. This would be a hell to him; and
if he had any wisdom he would know that his own
civilization
is a hell to the savage—but he hasn't any, and has never had
any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the
unimaginable
perdition of his civilization, committing his crime
with the very best intentions, and
saw those poor creatures
waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely
troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter
with them. One is almost betrayed into respecting those
criminals, they were so
sincerely kind, and tender, and humane,
and well-meaning.
They didn't know why those exiled savages faded away,
and they
did their honest best to reason it out. And one man,
in a like case in New South Wales,
did reason it out and arrive
at a solution:
"It is from the wrath of God, which is revealed from heaven
against
all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men."
That settles it.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
aphorism does really seem true: "Given the Circumstances,
the Man will appear." But the man
musn't appear ahead of time, or it will spoil everything.
In Robinson's case the Moment
had been approaching for a
quarter of a century—and meantime the future
Conciliator was
tranquilly laying bricks in Hobart. When all other means
had
failed, the Moment had arrived, and the Bricklayer put
down his trowel and came forward.
Earlier he would have
been jeered back to his trowel again. It reminds me of a tale
that was told me by a Kentuckian on the train when we were
crossing Montana. He
said the tale was current in Louisville
years ago. He thought it had been in print, but
could not
remember. At any rate, in substance it was this, as nearly as I
can call
it back to mind.
A few years before the outbreak of the Civil War it began
to appear that Memphis,
Tennessee, was going to be a great
tobacco entrepot—the wise could see the signs of it. At that
time Memphis had a
wharfboat, of course. There was a paved
sloping wharf, for the accommodation of freight,
but the
steamers landed on the outside of the wharfboat, and all loading
and unloading was done across it, between steamer and
shore. A number of wharfboat
clerks were needed, and part
of the time, every day, they were very busy, and part of
the
time tediously idle. They were boiling over with youth and
spirits, and they
had to make the intervals of idleness endurable
in some way; and as a rule, they did it by contriving practical
jokes and playing them upon each other.
The favorite butt for the jokes was Ed Jackson, because
he played none himself, and
was easy game for other people's
—for he always believed whatever was told
him.
One day he told the others his scheme for his holiday. He
was not going fishing or
hunting this time—no, he had
thought out a better plan. Out of his $40 a
month he had
saved enough for his purpose, in an economical way, and he
was going
to have a look at New York.
It was a great and surprising idea. It meant travel—
immense
travel—in those days it meant seeing the world; it
was the equivalent of a
voyage around it in ours. At first the
other youths thought his mind was affected, but
when they
found that he was in earnest, the next thing to be thought of
was, what
sort of opportunity this venture might afford for a
practical joke.
The young men studied over the matter, then held a secret
consultation and made a
plan. The idea was, that one of the
conspirations should offer Ed a letter of
introduction to Commodore
Vanderbilt, and trick him into delivering it. It would
be easy to do this. But
what would Ed do when he got back
to Memphis? That was a serious matter. He was goodhearted,
and had always taken the jokes patiently; but
they
had been jokes which did not humiliate him, did not bring him
to shame;
whereas, this would be a cruel one in that way, and
to play it was to meddle with fire;
for with all his good nature,
Ed was a Southerner—and the English of that
was, that
when he came back he would kill as many of the conspirators
as he could
before falling himself. However, the chances must
be taken—it wouldn't do to
waste such a joke as that.
So the letter was prepared with great care and elaboration.
It was signed Alfred
Fairchild, and was written in an easy
and friendly spirit. It stated that the bearer was the bosom
friend of the writer's
son, and was of good parts and sterling
character, and it begged the Commodore to be
kind to the
young stranger for the writer's sake. It went on to say, "You
may have
forgotten me, in this long stretch of time, but you
will easily call me back out of your
boyhood memories when I
remind you of how we robbed old Stevenson's orchard that
night; and how, while he was chasing down the road after us,
we cut across the field and
doubled back and sold his own
apples to his own cook for a hatfull of doughnuts; and the
time that we—" and so forth and so on, bringing in names of
imaginary
comrades, and detailing all sorts of wild and absurd
and, of course, wholly imaginary
schoolboy pranks and adventures,
but putting them into
lively and telling shape.
With all gravity Ed was asked if he would like to have
a letter to Commodore
Vanderbilt, the great millionaire. It
was expected that the question would astonish Ed,
and it did.
"What? Do you know that extraordinary man?"
"No; but my father does. They were schoolboys together.
And if you like, I'll write
and ask father. I know he'll be
glad to give it to you for my sake."
Ed could not find words capable of expressing his gratitude
and delight. The three days passed, and the letter was
put into his hands. He
started on his trip, still pouring out his
thanks while he shook good-bye all around.
And when he
was out of sight his comrades let fly their laughter in a storm
of
happy satisfaction—and then quieted down, and were less
happy, less
satisfied. For the old doubts as to the wisdom of
this deception began to intrude again.
Arrived in New York, Ed found his way to Commodore
Vanderbilt's business quarters, and
was ushered into a large
anteroom, where a score of people were patiently awaiting
their turn for a two-minute interview with the millionaire in
his private office. A servant asked for Ed's card, and got the
letter instead. Ed was sent for a moment later, and found
Mr. Vanderbilt alone, with the letter—open—in his hand.
"Pray sit down, Mr.—er—"
"Jackson."
"Ah—sit down, Mr. Jackson. By the opening sentences
it seems to be a letter
from an old friend. Allow me—I will
run my eye through it. He
says—he says—why, who is
it?" He turned the sheet and found the signature. "Alfred
Fairchild—hm—Fairchild—I don't recall the name. But
that is nothing—a thousand names have gone from me. He says
—he
says—hm—hm—oh, dear, but it's good! Oh, it's rare!
I
don't quite remember it, but I seem
to—it'll all come back to
me presently. He says—he
says—hm—hm—oh, but that was
a game! Oh, spl-endid! How
it carries me back! It's all
dim, of course—it's a long time
ago—and the names—some
of the names are wavery and indistinct—but sho', I know it
happened—I can feel it! and lord, how it warms my heart,
and brings back my lost youth! Well, well, well, I've got to
come back into this
work-a-day world now—business presses
and people are waiting—I'll
keep the rest for bed to-night,
and live my youth over again. And you'll thank Fairchild
for
me when you see him—I used to call him Alf, I think—and
you'll give him my gratitude for what this letter has done for
the tired spirit of a
hard-worked man; and tell him there
isn't anything that I can do for him or any friend
of his that
I won't do. And as for you, my lad, you are my guest; you
can't stop
at any hotel in New York. Sit where you are a
little while, till I get through with
these people, then we'll go
home. I'll take care of you, my
boy—make yourself easy as
to that."
Ed stayed a week, and had an immense time—and never
suspected that the
Commodore's shrewd eye was on him, and
that he was daily being weighed and measured and analyzed
and tried and tested.
Yes, he had an immense time; and never wrote home, but
saved it all up to tell when he
should get back. Twice, with
proper modesty and decency, he proposed to end his visit,
but
the Commodore said, "No—wait; leave it to me; I'll tell
you when to
go."
In those days the Commodore was making some of those
vast combinations of
his—consolidations of warring odds and
ends of railroads into harmonious
systems, and concentrations
of floating and rudderless commerce in effective
centers—and
among other things his far-seeing eye had detected the convergence
of that huge tobacco-commerce, already spoken of,
toward Memphis, and he had
resolved to set his grasp upon it
and make it his own.
The week came to an end. Then the Commodore said:
"Now you can start home. But first we will have some
more talk about that tobacco
matter. I know you now. I
know your abilities as well as you know them yourself—perhaps
better. You understand that tobacco matter; you understand
that I am going to take possession of it, and you also
understand the plans which
I have matured for doing it.
What I want is a man who knows my mind, and is qualified
to represent me in Memphis, and be in supreme command of
that important
business—and I appoint you."
"Me!"
"Yes. Your salary will be high—of course—for you are
representing me. Later you will earn increases of it, and
will get them. You will need a
small army of assistants;
choose them yourself—and carefully. Take no man for
friendship's sake; but, all things being equal, take the man
you know, take your
friend, in preference to the stranger."
After some further talk under this head, the
Commodore said:
"Good-bye, my boy, and thank Alf for me, for sending you
to me."
When Ed reached Memphis he rushed down to the wharf
in a fever to tell his great news
and thank the boys over and
over again for thinking to give him the letter to Mr. Vanderbilt.
It happened to be one of those idle times.
Blazing hot
noonday, and no sign of life on the wharf. But as Ed
threaded his way
among the freight piles, he saw a white linen
figure stretched in slumber upon a pile of
grain-sacks under an
awning, and said to himself, "That's one of them," and hastened
his step; next, he said, "It's Charley—it's Fairchild—
good"; and the next moment laid an affectionate hand on the
sleeper's shoulder. The eyes
opened lazily, took one glance,
the face blanched, the form whirled itself from the
sack-pile,
and in an instant Ed was alone and Fairchild was flying for
the
wharfboat like the wind!
Ed was dazed, stupefied. Was Fairchild crazy? What
could be the meaning of this? He
started slow and dreamily
down toward the wharfboat; turned the corner of a freight-pile
and came suddenly upon two of the boys. They were
lightly laughing over some
pleasant matter; they heard his
step, and glanced up just as he discovered them; the
laugh
died abruptly; and before Ed could speak they were off, and
sailing over
barrels and bales like hunted deer. Again Ed was
paralyzed. Had the boys all gone mad?
What could be the
explanation of this extraordinary conduct? And
so, dreaming
along, he reached the wharfboat, and stepped aboard—
nothing but
silence there, and vacancy. He crossed the deck,
turned the corner to go down the outer
guard, heard a fervent—
"O lord!" and saw a white linen form plunge overboard.
The youth came up coughing and strangling, and cried out—
"Go' way from here! You let me alone. I didn't do it, I
swear I
didn't!"
"Didn't do what?"
"Give you the—"
"Never mind what you didn't do—come out of that!
What makes you all act
so? What have I done?"
"GO 'WAY FROM HERE!"
"You? Why you
haven't done anything.
But—"
"Well, then, what have
you got against me?
What do you all treat me
so
for?"
"I—er—but haven't
you got anything against
us?"
"Ofcourse not. What
put such a thing into your head?"
"Honor bright—you haven't?"
"Honor bright."
"Swear it!"
"I don't know what in the world you mean, but I swear it,
anyway."
"And you'll shake hands with me?"
"Goodness knows I'll be glad to! Why, I'm just starving
to
shake hands with somebody!"
The swimmer muttered, "Hang him, he smelt a rat and
never delivered the
letter!—but it's all right, I'm not going
to fetch up the subject." And he
crawled out and came dripping
and draining to shake hands. First one and then another
of the conspirators showed
up cautiously—armed to the teeth
—took in the amicable situation,
then ventured warily forward
and joined the love-feast.
And to Ed's eager inquiry as to what made them act as
they had been acting, they
answered evasively, and pretended
that they had put it up as a joke, to see what he
would do. It
was the best explanation they could invent at such short notice.
And
each said to himself, "He never delivered that letter, and
the joke is on us, if he only knew it or we were dull enough to
come out and tell."
Then, of course, they wanted to know all about the trip;
and he said—
"Come right up on the boiler deck and order the drinks—
it's my treat. I'm
going to tell you all about it. And to-night
it's my treat again—and we'll
have oysters and a time!"
When the drinks were brought and cigars lighted, Ed said—
"Well, when I delivered the letter to Mr. Vanderbilt—"
"Great Scott!"
"Gracious, how you scared me. What's the matter?"
"Oh—er—nothing. Nothing—it was a tack in the
chair-seat," said one.
"But you all said it. However, no matter. When I delivered
the letter—"
"Did you deliver it?" And they looked at each other as
people
might who thought that maybe they were dreaming.
Then they settled to listening; and as the story deepened
and its marvels grew, the
amazement of it made them dumb,
and the interest of it took their breath. They hardly
uttered
a whisper during two hours, but sat like petrifactions and
drank in the
immortal romance. At last the tale was ended,
and Ed said—
"And it's all owing to you, boys, and you'll never find me
ungrateful—bless your hearts, the best friends a fellow ever
had!
You'll all have places; I want every one of you. I
know you—I know you 'by the back,' as
the gamblers say.
You're jokers, and all that, but you're sterling, with the hallmark
on. And Charley Fairchild, you shall be my first assistant
and right hand, because of your first-class ability, and because
you got me the letter, and for your father's sake who
wrote it for me, and to
please Mr. Vanderbilt, who said it
would! And here's to that
great man—drink hearty!"
Yes, when the Moment comes, the Man appears—even if
he is a thousand miles
away, and has to be discovered by a
practical joke.
RELICS OF CONVICT DISCIPLINE.
CHAPTER XXIX.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his
private
heart no man much respects himself.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, the human interest is the first interest
in
the log-book of any country. The annals of Tasmania,
in
whose shadow we were sailing, are lurid
with that feature. Tasmania was a convict-dump,
in old
times; this has been indicated in the account of the Conciliator,
where reference is made to vain attempts of desperate
convicts to win to permanent freedom, after escaping from
Macquarrie Harbor and the
"Gates of Hell." In the early
days Tasmania had a great population of convicts, of both
sexes and all ages, and a bitter hard life they had. In one spot
there was a
settlement of juvenile convicts—children—who
had been sent thither
from their home and their friends on
the other side of the globe to expiate their
"crimes."
In due course our ship entered the estuary called the Derwent,
at whose head stands Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.
The Derwent's shores furnish
scenery of an interesting sort.
The historian Laurie, whose book," The Story of
Australasia,"
is just out, invoices its features with considerable truth and intemperance:
"The marvelous picturesqueness of every point
of view, combined with the clear balmy atmosphere and the
transparency of the
ocean depths, must have delighted and
deeply impressed" the early explorers. "If the
rock-bound
coasts, sullen, defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting,
these were
occasionally broken into charmingly alluring coves
floored with golden sand, clad with
evergreen shrubbery, and
adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle, she-oak, wild
flower, and fern, from
the delicately graceful 'maiden-hair' to
the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic
gum-tree, clean
and smooth as the mast of 'some tall ammiral' pierces the
clear
air to the height of 230 feet or more."
It looked so to me. "Coasting along Tasman's Peninsula,
what a shock of pleasant
wonder must have struck the early
mariner on suddenly sighting Cape Pillar, with its
cluster of
black-ribbed basaltic columns rising to a height of 900 feet, the
hydra
head wreathed in a turban of fleecy cloud, the base
lashed by jealous waves spouting
angry fountains of foam."
That is well enough, but I did not suppose those snags
were 900 feet high. Still they
were a very fine show. They
stood boldly out by themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd
spectacle. But there was nothing about their appearance to
suggest the heads of a
hydra. They looked like a row of lofty
slabs with their upper ends tapered to the shape
of a carving-knife
point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of their great
height, might have
mistaken them for a rusty old rank of piles
that had sagged this way and that out of the
perpendicular.
The Peninsula is lofty, rocky, and densely clothed with
scrub, or brush, or both. It
is joined to the main by a low
neck. At this junction was formerly a convict station
called
Port Arthur—a place hard to escape from. Behind it was
the
wilderness of scrub, in which a fugitive would soon starve;
in front was the narrow
neck, with a cordon of chained dogs
across it, and a line of lanterns, and a fence of
living guards,
armed. We saw the place as we swept by—that is, we had a
glimpse of what we were told was the entrance to Port
Arthur. The glimpse was worth
something, as a remembrancer,
but that was all.
"The voyage thence up the Derwent Frith displays a
grand succession of fairy visions,
in its entire length elsewhere
unequaled. In gliding over the deep blue sea studded with
lovely islets luxuriant to the water's edge, one is at a loss
which scene to choose for contemplation and to admire most.
When the Huon and Bruni have been passed, there seems no
possible chance of a rival; but suddenly Mount Wellington,
massive and noble like his brother Etna, literally heaves in sight,
sternly guarded on either hand by Mounts Nelson and Rumney;
presently we arrive at Sullivan's Cove—Hobart!"
It is an attractive town. It sits on low hills that slope to
the harbor—a
harbor that looks like a river, and is as smooth
as one. Its still surface is pictured
with dainty reflections of
boats and grassy banks and luxuriant foliage. Back of the
town rise highlands that are clothed in woodland loveliness,
and over the way is
that noble mountain, Wellington, a
stately bulk, a most majestic pile. How beautiful is
the whole
region, for form, and grouping, and opulence, and freshness of
foliage,
and variety of color, and grace and shapeliness of the
hills, the capes, the
promontories; and then, the splendor of
the sunlight, the dim rich distances, the charm
of the water-glimpses!
And it was in this paradise
that the yellow-liveried
convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits quartered, and the
wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated
on that autumn day in May, in the brutish old
time. It was all out of keeping with
the place, a sort of bringing
of heaven and hell together.
The remembrance of this paradise reminds me that it was
at Hobart that we struck the
head of the procession of Junior
Englands. We were to encounter other sections of it in
New
Zealand, presently, and others later in Natal. Wherever the
exiled Englishman
can find in his new home resemblances to his
old one, he is touched to the marrow of his
being; the love that
is in his heart inspires his imagination, and these allied forces
transfigure those resemblances into authentic duplicates of the
revered originals. It is beautiful, the feeling which works
this enchantment, and it
compels one's homage; compels it,
and also compels one's assent—compels it
always—even
when, as happens sometimes, one does not see the resemblances
as clearly as does the exile who is pointing them out.
The resemblances do exist, it is quite true; and often they
cunningly approximate the
originals—but after all, in the
matter of certain physical patent rights
there is only one
England. Now that I have sampled the globe, I am not in
doubt.
There is a beauty of Switzerland, and it is repeated
in the glaciers and snowy ranges of
many parts of the earth;
there is a beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New
Zealand
and Alaska; there is a beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in
ten
thousand islands of the Southern seas; there is a beauty of
the prairie and the plain,
and it is repeated here and there in
the earth; each of these is worshipful, each is
perfect in its
way, yet holds no monopoly of its beauty; but that beauty
which is
England is alone—it has no duplicate.
It is made up of very simple details—just grass, and trees,
and shrubs, and
roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses,
and vines, and churches, and castles, and
here and there a ruin
—and over it all a mellow dream-haze of history. But
its
beauty is incomparable, and all its own.
Hobart has a peculiarity—it is the neatest town that the
sun shines on; and
I incline to believe that it is also the
cleanest. However that may be, its supremacy in
neatness is
not to be questioned. There cannot be another town in the
world that
has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates and
fences, no neglected houses crumbling to
ruin, no crazy and
unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no
back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty
bottles, no rubbish in the
gutters, no clutter on the sidewalks,
no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes and
tin-patched
huts. No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a comfort
to the eye; the
modestest cottage looks combed and brushed,
and has its vines, its flowers, its neat
fence, its neat gate, its
comely cat asleep on the window ledge.
We had a glimpse of the museum, by courtesy of the
American gentleman who is curator
of it. It has samples of
half-a-dozen different kinds of marsupials*
A marsupial is a plantigrade vertebrate whose specialty is its pocket. In some
countries it is extinct, in the others it is rare. The first American marsupials were
Stephen girard, Mr. Astor, and the opossum; the principal marsupials of the
Southern
Hemisphere are Mr. Rhodes, and the kangaroo. I, myself, am the latest
marsuipal. Also,
I might boast that I have the largest pocket of them all. But
there is nothing in
that.
devil;" that is, I think he was one of them. And
there was a fish with lungs. When the water dries up it can
live in the mud. Most curious of all was a parrot that kills
sheep. On one great sheep-run this bird killed a thousand
sheep in a whole year. He doesn't want the whole sheep, but
only the kidney-fat. This restricted taste makes him an expensive
bird to support. To get the fat he drives his beak in
and rips it out; the wound is mortal. This parrot furnishes a
notable example of evolution brought about by changed con
ditions. When the sheep culture was introduced, it presently
brought famine to the parrot by exterminating a kind of grub
which had always thitherto been the parrot's diet. The miseries
of hunger made the bird willing to eat raw flesh, since it could
get no other food, and it began to pick remnants of meat from
sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry. It soon came to prefer
sheep meat to any other food, and by and by it came to prefer
the kidney-fat to any other detail of the sheep. The parrot's bill
was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but Nature fixed
that matter; she altered the bill's shape, and now the parrot can
dig out kidney-fat better than the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court, or anybody else, for that matter—even an Admiral.
And there was another curiosity—quite a stunning one, I
thought: Arrow-heads and knives just like those which
Primeval Man made out of flint,
and thought he had done such
a wonderful thing—yes, and has been humored and
coddled
in that superstition by this age of admiring scientists until
there is
probably no living with him in the other world by
now. Yet here is his finest and nicest
work exactly duplicated
in our day; and by people who have never heard of him or
his works: by aborigines who lived in the islands of these seas,
within our time. And
they not only duplicated those works of
art but did it in the brittlest and most
treacherous of substances
—glass: made them out of old
brandy bottles flung out of
the British camps; millions of tons of them. It is time for
Primeval Man to make a little less noise, now. He has had
his day. He is not what
he used to be.
We had a drive through a bloomy and odorous fairy-land,
to the Refuge for the
Indigent—a spacious and comfortable
home, with hospitals, etc., for both
sexes. There was a crowd
there, of the oldest people I have ever seen. It was like being
suddenly set down in a new world—a weird world where
Youth has never
been, a world sacred to Age, and bowed
forms, and wrinkles. Out of the 359 persons
present, 223
were ex-convicts, and could have told stirring tales, no doubt,
if
they had been minded to talk; 42 of the 359 were past 80,
and several were close upon
90; the average age at death
there is 76 years. As for me, I have no use for that place;
it is too healthy. Seventy is old enough—after that, there is
too much
risk. Youth and gaiety might vanish, any day—and
then, what is left? Death in
life; death without its privileges,
death without its benefits. There were 185 women in
that
Refuge, and 81 of them were ex-convicts.
The steamer disappointed us. Instead of making a long
visit at Hobart, as usual, she
made a short one. So we got but
a glimpse of Tasmania, and then moved on.
CHAPTER XXX.
Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him
with an
appetite for sand.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
spent part of an afternoon and a night at sea, and
reached Bluff, in New Zealand, early in the morning.
Bluff is at the bottom of the
middle island, and is
away down south, nearly forty-seven degrees below the equator.
It lies as far south of the line as Quebec lies north
of it,
and the climates of the two should be alike; but for some
reason or other
it has not been so arranged. Quebec is hot in
the summer and cold in the winter, but
Bluff's climate is less
intense; the cold weather is not very cold, the hot weather is
not very hot; and the difference between the hottest month
and the coldest is but
17 degrees Fahrenheit.
In New Zealand the rabbit plague began at Bluff. The
man who introduced the rabbit
there was banqueted and
lauded; but they would hang him, now, if they could get him.
In England the natural enemy of the rabbit is detested and
persecuted; in the
Bluff region the natural enemy of the
rabbit is honored, and his person is sacred. The
rabbit's
natural enemy in England is the poacher, in Bluff its natural
enemy is
the stoat, the weasel, the ferret, the cat, and the
mongoose. In England any person
below the Heir who is
caught with a rabbit in his possession must satisfactorily explain
how it got there, or he will suffer fine and imprisonment,
together with
extinction of his peerage; in Bluff, the cat
found with a rabbit in its possession does
not have to explain
—everybody looks the other way; the person caught
noticing
would suffer fine and imprisonment, with extinction of peerage.
This is a sure way to undermine the moral fabric of a
cat. Thirty years from now there will not be a moral cat in
New Zealand. Some think there is none there now. In England
the poacher is watched, tracked, hunted—he dare not
show his face; in Bluff the cat, the weasel, the stoat, and the
mongoose go up and down, whither they will, unmolested.
By a law of the legislature, posted where all may read, it is
decreed that any person found in possession of one of these
creatures (dead) must satisfactorily explain the circumstances
or pay a fine of not less than £5, nor more than £20. The
revenue from this source is not large. Persons who want to
pay a hundred dollars for a dead cat are getting rarer and
rarer every day. This is bad, for the revenue was to go to the
endowment of a University. All governments are more or
less short-sighted: in England they fine the poacher, whereas
he ought to be banished to New Zealand. New Zealand
would pay his way, and give him wages.
LAKE MANAPOURI.
It was from Bluff that we ought to have cut across to the
west coast and visited the
New Zealand Switzerland, a land of
superb scenery, made up of snowy grandeurs, and
mighty
glaciers, and beautiful lakes; and over there, also, are the
wonderful
rivals of the Norwegian and Alaskan fiords; and
for neighbor, a waterfall of 1,900 feet;
but we were obliged
to postpone the trip to some later and indefinite time.
November 6. A lovely summer morning; brilliant blue
sky. A few miles out from Invercargill, passed through vast
level green expanses snowed over with sheep. Fine to see.
The green, deep and very vivid sometimes; at other times less
so, but delicate and lovely. A passenger reminds me that I
am in "the England of the Far South."
Monument to a Maori robber who
went about on stilts; thus avoiding detection
for a long time. So great was
the public admiration of his shrewdness
that
this monument was erected. It is
supposed to be a portrait of the man
and the
stilts.
Dunedin, same date. The town justifies Michael Davitt's
praises. The people are Scotch.
They stopped here on their way
from home to
heaven—thinking
they had arrived. The population
is stated at 40,000,
by Malcolm
Ross, journalist; stated by an M. P.
at 60,000. A journalist cannot
lie.
To the residence of Dr. Hockin.
He has a fine collection of books
relating to
New Zealand; and his
house is a museum of Maori art
and antiquities. He has
pictures
and prints in color of many native
chiefs of the past—some of
them
of note in history. There is nothing
of the savage in the faces;
nothing could be finer than these
men's
features, nothing more intellectual
than these faces, nothing
more masculine, nothing nobler
than their aspect.
The aboriginals
of Australia and Tasmania
looked the savage, but these chiefs
looked like
Roman patricians. The tattooing in these portraits
ought to suggest the savage, of
course, but it does not. The
designs are so flowing and graceful and beautiful that they
are
a most satisfactory decoration. It takes but fifteen minutes
to get reconciled
to the tattooing, and but fifteen more to
perceive that it is just the thing. After that, the undecorated
European face is unpleasant and ignoble.
Dr. Hockin gave us a ghastly curiosity—a lignified caterpillar
with a plant growing out of the back of its neck—a
plant with a slender
stem 4 inches high. It happened not by
accident, but by design—Nature's
design. This caterpillar
was in the act of loyally carrying out a law inflicted upon
him by Nature—a law purposely inflicted upon him to get
him into
trouble—a law which was a trap; in pursuance of
this law he made the proper
preparations for turning himself
into a night-moth; that is to say, he dug a little
trench, a little
grave, and then stretched himself out in it on his stomach and
partially buried himself—then Nature was ready for him.
She blew the spores
of a peculiar fungus through the air—
with a purpose. Some of them fell into
a crease in the back
of the caterpillar's neck, and began to sprout and
grow—for
there was soil there—he had not washed his neck. The
roots forced themselves down into the worm's person, and
rearward along through
its body, sucking up the creature's
juices for sap; the worm slowly died, and turned to
wood.
And here he was now, a wooden caterpillar, with every detail
of his former
physique delicately and exactly preserved and
perpetuated, and with that stem standing
up out of him for
his monument—monument commemorative of his own loyalty
and of Nature's unfair return for it.
Nature is always acting like that. Mrs. X. said (of
course) that the
caterpillar was not conscious and didn't
suffer. She should have known better. No
caterpillar can
deceive Nature. If this one couldn't suffer, Nature would
have
known it and would have hunted up another caterpillar.
Not that she would have let this
one go, merely because it
was defective. No. She would have waited and let him turn
into a night-moth; and then fried him in the candle.
Nature cakes a fish's eyes over with parasites, so that it
shan't be able to avoid its enemies or find its food. She sends
parasites into a star-fish's system, which clog up its prongs
and swell them and make them so uncomfortable that the
poor creature delivers itself from the prong to ease its misery;
and presently it has to part with another prong for the sake
of comfort, and finally with a third. If it re-grows the
prongs, the parasite returns and the same thing is repeated.
And finally, when the ability to reproduce prongs is lost
through age, that poor old star-fish can't get around any more,
and so it dies of starvation.
In Australia is prevalent a horrible disease due to an
"unperfected tape-worm."
Unperfected—that is what they
call it, I do not know why, for it transacts
business just as
well as if it were finished and frescoed and gilded, and all that.
November 9. To the museum and public picture gallery
with the
president of the Society of Artists. Some fine pictures
there, lent by the S. of
A.—several of them they bought, the
others came to them by gift. Next, to the
gallery of the
S. of A.—annual exhibition—just opened. Fine. Think
of
a town like this having two such collections as this, and a
Society of Artists.
It is so all over Australasia. If it were a
monarchy one might understand it. I mean an
absolute
monarchy, where it isn't necessary to vote money, but take it.
Then art
flourishes. But these colonies are republics—republics
with a wide suffrage; voters of both sexes, this one of
New Zealand. In republics,
neither the government nor the
rich private citizen is much given to propagating art.
All
over Australasia pictures by famous European artists are
bought for the public
galleries by the State and by societies of
citizens. Living citizens—not dead
ones. They rob
themselves
to give, not their heirs. This S. of A. here owns its
buildings—built
it by subscription.
CHAPTER XXXI.
The spirit of wrath—not the words—is the sin; and the spirit of wrath
is
cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
11. On the road. This
train—express—
goes twenty and one-half miles an hour, schedule
time; but it is fast enough, the outlook upon sea and
land is so interesting, and
the cars so comfortable. They
are not English, and not American; they are the Swiss combination
of the two. A narrow and railed porch along the
side, where a person can walk up
and down. A lavatory in
each car. This is progress; this is nineteenth-century spirit.
In New Zealand, these fast expresses run twice a week. It is
well to know this if
you want to be a bird and fly through the
country at a 20-mile gait; otherwise you may
start on one of
the five wrong days, and then you will get a train that can't
overtake its own shadow.
By contrast, these pleasant cars call to mind the branch-road
cars at Maryborough, Australia, and the passengers' talk
about the branch-road and
the hotel.
Somewhere on the road to Maryborough I changed for a
while to a smoking-carriage.
There were two gentlemen there;
both riding backward, one at each end of the
compartment.
They were acquaintances of each other. I sat down facing the
one that
sat at the starboard window. He had a good face,
and a friendly look, and I judged from
his dress that he was a
dissenting minister. He was along toward fifty. Of his own
motion he struck a match, and shaded it with his hand for me
to light my cigar. I take
the rest from my diary:
In order to start conversation I asked him something about
Maryborough. He said, in a
most pleasant—even musical—
voice, but with quiet and cultured
decision:
"It's a charming town, with a hell of a hotel."
I was astonished. It seemed so odd to hear a minister
swear out loud. He went placidly
on:
"It's the worst hotel in Australia. Well, one may go
further, and say in Australasia."
"Bad beds?"
"No—none at all. Just sand-bags."
"The pillows, too?"
"Yes, the pillows, too. Just sand. And not a good quality
of sand. It packs too hard,
and has never been screened.
There is too much gravel in it. It is like sleeping on
nuts."
"Isn't there any good sand?"
"Plenty of it. There is as good bed-sand in this region as
the world can furnish.
Aerated sand—and loose; but they
won't buy it. They want something that will
pack solid,
and petrify."
"How are the rooms?"
"Eight feet square; and a sheet of iced oil-cloth to step
on in the morning when you
get out of the sand-quarry."
"As to lights?"
"Coal-oil lamp."
"A good one?"
"No. It's the kind that sheds a gloom."
"I like a lamp that burns all night."
"This one won't. You must blow it out early."
"That is bad. One might want it again in the night.
Can't find it in the dark."
"There's no trouble; you can find it by the stench."
"Wardrobe?"
"Two nails on the door to hang seven suits of clothes on—
if you've got
them."
"Bells?"
"There aren't any."
"What do you do when you want service?"
"Shout. But it won't fetch anybody."
"Suppose you want the chambermaid to empty the slop-jar?"
"There isn't any slop-jar. The hotels don't keep them.
That is, outside of Sydney and
Melbourne."
"Yes, I knew that. I was only talking. It's the oddest
thing in Australia. Another
thing: I've got to get up in the
dark, in the morning, to take
the 5 o'clock
train. Now
if the boots—"
A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT.
"There isn't any."
"Well, the porter."
"There isn't any."
"But who will call
me?"
"Nobody. You'll call
yourself. And you'll light
yourself, too. There'll not
be a light burning
in the halls or anywhere.
And if you
don't carry a light,
you'll break your
neck."
"But who will
help me down with
my baggage?"
"Nobody. However, I will tell you what to do. In Maryborough
there's an American who has lived there half a lifetime;
a fine man, and prosperous and popular. He will be on
the lookout for you; you won't have any trouble. Sleep in
peace; he will rout you out, and you will make your train.
Where is your manager?"
"I left him at Ballarat, studying the language. And
besides, he had to go to Melbourne
and get us ready for New
Zealand. I've not tried to pilot myself before, and it doesn't
look easy."
"Easy! You've selected the very most difficult piece of
railroad in Australia for your
experiment. There are twelve
miles of this road which no man without good executive
ability
can ever hope—tell me, have you good executive ability?—
first-rate executive ability?"
"I—well, I think so, but—"
"That settles it. The tone of—oh, you wouldn't ever
make it in the world. However, that American will point
you right, and you'll go. You've
got tickets?"
"Yes—round trip; all the way to Sydney."
"Ah, there it is, you see! You are going in the 5 o'clock
by
Castlemaine—twelve miles—instead of the 7.15 by Ballarat—in
order to save two hours of fooling along the road.
Now then, don't
interrupt—let me have the floor. You're
going to save the government a deal
of hauling, but that's
nothing; your ticket is by Ballarat, and it isn't good over that
twelve miles, and so—"
"But why should the government care which way I go?"
"Goodness knows! Ask of the winds that far away with
fragments strewed the sea, as the
boy that stood on the burning
deck used to say. The government chooses to do its railway
business in its own way, and it doesn't know as much
about it as the French. In
the beginning they tried idiots;
then they imported the French—which was
going backwards,
you see; now it runs the roads itself—which is going backwards
again, you see. Why, do you know, in order to curry
favor with the voters, the government puts down a road
wherever anybody wants it—anybody that owns two sheep
and a dog; and by consequence we've got, in the colony of
Victoria, 800 railway stations, and the business done at eighty
of them doesn't foot up twenty shillings a week."
"Five dollars? Oh, come!"
"It's true. It's the absolute truth."
"Why, there are three or four men on wages at every station."
"I know it. And the station-business doesn't pay for the
sheep-dip to sanctify their
coffee with. It's just as I say. And
accommodating? Why, if you shake a rag the train
will stop
in the midst of the wilderness to pick you up. All that kind
of politics
costs, you see. And then, besides, any town that
has a good many votes and wants a fine
station, gets it. Don't
you overlook that Maryborough station, if you take an interest
in governmental curiosities. Why, you can put the whole
population of Maryborough
into it, and give them a sofa apiece,
and have room for more. You haven't fifteen
stations in
America that are as big, and you probably haven't five that
are half
as fine. Why, it's per-fectly elegant. And the clock!
Everybody will show you the clock.
There isn't a station in
Europe that's got such a clock. It doesn't
strike—and that's
one mercy. It hasn't any bell; and as you'll have cause to
remember, if you keep your reason, all Australia is simply bedamned
with bells. On every quarter-hour, night and day,
they jingle a tiresome chime of
half a dozen notes—all the
clocks in town at once, all the clocks in
Australasia at once,
and all the very same notes; first, downward
scale: mi, re, do,
sol—then upward scale: sol, si, re, do—down again: mi, re,
do,
sol—up again: sol, si, re, do—then the
clock—say at
AUSTRALIAN BELLS.
midnight: clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—clang—
clang—clang!—and, by that time you're—
hello, what's all this excitement about?
Oh, I see—a runaway—scared
by the train; why, you
wouldn't think this train
could scare anything. Well,
of course, when they build
and run eighty stations
at a loss, and a lot of palace-stations
and clocks
like Mary-borough's
at another loss,
the govern-ment
has got to econ-omize
somewhere, hasn't
it? Very well—look at
the rolling stock! That's
where they save the money.
Why, that train from Maryborough
will consist of eighteen
freight-cars and two passenger-kennels;
cheap, poor,
shabby, slovenly;
no drinking water,
no sanitary arrangements,
every imaginable
inconvenience; and slow?—
oh, the gait of cold molasses;
no air-brake, no springs, and they'll
jolt your head off every time they start or
stop. That's where they make their little economies, you see.
They spend tons of money to house you palatially while you
wait fifteen minutes for a train, then degrade you to six hours'
convict-transportation to get the foolish outlay back. What
a rational man really needs is discomfort while he's waiting,
then his journey in a nice train would be a grateful change.
But no, that would be common sense—and out of place in a
government. And then, besides, they save in that other little
detail, you know—repudiate their own tickets, and collect a
poor little illegitimate extra shilling out of you for that
twelve miles, and—"
"Well, in any case—"
"Wait—there's more. Leave that American out of the
account and see what
would happen. There's nobody on hand
to examine your ticket when you arrive. But the
conductor
will come and examine it when the train is ready to start. It
is too
late to buy your extra ticket now; the train can't wait,
and won't. You must climb out."
"But can't I pay the conductor?"
"No, he is not authorized to receive the money, and he
won't. You must climb out.
There's no other way. I tell
you, the railway management is about the only thoroughly
European thing here—continentally European I mean, not
English. It's
the continental business in perfection; down fine.
Oh, yes, even to the peanut-commerce of weighing baggage."
The train slowed up at his place. As he stepped out he said:
"Yes, you'll like Maryborough. Plenty of intelligence
there. It's a charming
place—with a hell of a hotel."
Then he was gone. I turned to the other gentleman:
"Is your friend in the ministry?"
"No—studying for it."
CHAPTER XXXII.
The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
was Junior England all the way to Christchurch—in
fact, just a garden. And Christchurch is an English
town, with an English-park
annex, and a winding English
brook just like the Avon—and named the Avon; but
from a
man, not from Shakespeare's river. Its grassy banks are
bordered by the
stateliest and most impressive weeping willows
to be found in the world, I suppose. They continue the
line of a great ancestor;
they were grown from sprouts of the
willow that sheltered Napoleon's grave in St.
Helena. It is a
settled old community, with all the serenities, the graces, the
conveniences, and the comforts of the ideal home-life. If it
had an established Church
and social inequality it would be
England over again with hardly a lack.
In the museum we saw many curious and interesting
things; among others a fine native
house of the olden time,
with all the details true to the facts, and the showy colors
right and in their proper places. All the details: the fine
mats and rugs and
things; the elaborate and wonderful wood
carvings—wonderful, surely,
considering who did them—
wonderful in design and particularly in execution,
for they
were done with admirable sharpness and exactness, and yet
with no better
tools than flint and jade and shell could furnish;
and the totem-posts were there,
ancestor above ancestor, with
tongues protruded and hands clasped comfortably over
bellies
containing other people's ancestors—grotesque and ugly devils,
every one, but lovingly carved, and ably; and the stuffed
natives were present, in their proper places, and looking as
natural as life; and the housekeeping utensils were there, too,
and close at hand the carved and finely ornamented war canoe.
And we saw little jade gods, to hand around the neck—
not everybody's, but
sacred to the necks of natives of rank.
Also jade weapons, and many kinds of jade
trinkets—all
made out of that excessively hard stone without the help of
any tool of iron. And some of these things
had small round holes bored through
them—
nobody knows how it was done; a mystery,
a lost art. I think it
was said that if you want
such a hole bored in a piece of jade now, you
must send
it to London or Amsterdam where
the lapidaries are.
Also we saw a complete skeleton
of the giant Moa. It stood ten feet
high, and
must have been a sight
to look at when it was a living
bird. It was a kicker, like
the
ostrich; in fight it did not use its
beak, but its foot. It must have
been a convincing kind of kick.
If a person had his back to the bird and did not see who
it
was that did it, he would think he had been kicked by a
wind-mill.
There must have been a sufficiency of moas in the old
forgotten days when his breed
walked the earth. His bones
are found in vast masses, all crammed together in huge
graves.
They are not in caves, but in the ground. Nobody knows how
they happened
to get concentrated there. Mind, they are
bones, not fossils. This means that the moa
has not been
extinct very long. Still, this is the only New Zealand creature
which has no mention in that otherwise comprehensive literature,
the native legends. This is a significant detail, and is
good circumstantial evidence that the moa has been extinct
500 years, since the Maori has himself—by tradition—been
in New Zealand since the end of the fifteenth century. He
came from an unknown land—the first Maori did—then
sailed back in his canoe and brought his tribe, and they removed
the aboriginal peoples into the sea and into the ground
and took the land. That is the tradition. That that first
Maori could come, is understandable, for anybody can come to
a place when he isn't trying to; but how that discoverer found
his way back home again without a compass is his secret, and
he died with it in him. His language indicates that he came
from Polynesia. He told where he came from, but he couldn't
spell well, so one can't find the place on the map, because
people who could spell better than he could, spelt the resemblance
all out of it when they made the map. However, it is
better to have a map that is spelt right than one that has
information in it.
In New Zealand women have the right to vote for members
of the legislature, but they cannot be members themselves.
The law extending the suffrage to them went into
effect in
1893. The population of Christchurch (census of
1891) was 31,454. The
first election under the law was held
in November of that year. Number of men who voted,
6,313;
number of women who voted, 5,989. These figures ought to
convince us that
women are not as indifferent about politics as
some people would have us believe. In New
Zealand as a
whole, the estimated adult female population was 139,915; of
these
109,461 qualified and registered their names on the rolls
—78.23 per cent. of
the whole. Of these, 90,290 went to the
polls and voted—85.18 per cent. Do
men ever turn out
better than that—in America or elsewhere? Here is a remark
to the other sex's credit, too—I take it from the official
report:
"A feature of the election was the orderliness and sobriety
of the people. Women were
in no way molested."
At home, a standing argument against woman suffrage has
always been that women could
not go to the polls without being
insulted. The arguments against woman suffrage have
always
taken the easy form of prophecy. The prophets have been
prophesying ever
since the woman's rights movement began in
1848—and in forty-seven years they
have never scored a hit.
Men ought to begin to feel a sort of respect for their
mothers and wives and sisters
by this time. The women
deserve a change of attitude like that, for they have wrought
well. In forty-seven years they have swept an imposingly
large number of unfair
laws from the statute books of America.
In that brief time these serfs have set
themselves free—
essentially. Men could not have done so much for themselves
in that time without bloodshed--at least they never have;
and that is argument
that they didn't know how. The women
have accomplished a peaceful revolution, and a very
beneficent
one; and yet that has not convinced the average man that
they are
intelligent, and have courage and energy and perseverance
and fortitude. It takes much to convince the average
man of anything; and perhaps
nothing can ever make him
realize that he is the average woman's inferior—yet
in several
important details the evidences seems to show that that is
what he is.
Man has ruled the human race from the beginning—but
he should remember that up to the middle of the
present century it was a dull
world, and ignorant and stupid;
but it is not such a dull world now, and is growing less
and
less dull all the time. This is woman's opportunity—she has
had
none before. I wonder where man will be in another
forty-seven years?
In the New Zealand law occurs this: "The word person
wherever it occurs throughout the Act includes woman."
That is promotion, you see. By that enlargement of the
word, the matron with the
garnered wisdom and experience of
fifty years becomes at one jump the political equal of
her
callow kid of twenty-one. The white population of the colony
is 626,000, the
Maori population is 42,000. The whites elect
seventy members of the House of
Representatives, the Maoris
four. The Maori women vote for their four members.
November 16. After four pleasant days in Christchurch,
we are
to leave at midnight to-night. Mr. Kinsey gave me an
ornithorhyncus, and I am taming it.
Sunday, 17th. Sailed last night in the Flora, from Lyttelton.
So we did. I remember it yet. The people who sailed in
the Flora that night may forget some other things if they live
a good while, but they
will not live long enough to forget
that. The Flora is about the
equivalent of a cattle-scow;
but when the Union Company find it inconvenient to keep a
contract and lucrative to break it, they smuggle her into
passenger service, and
"keep the change."
They give no notice of their projected depredation; you
innocently buy tickets for the
advertised passenger boat, and
when you get down to Lyttelton at midnight, you find that
they have substituted the scow. They have plenty of good
boats, but no
competition—and that is the trouble. It is too
late now to make other
arrangements if you have engagements
ahead.
It is a powerful company, it has a monopoly, and everybody
is afraid of it—including the government's representative,
who stands at the end of the stage-plank to tally the
passengers and see that no boat receives a greater number
than the law allows her to
carry. This conveniently-blind
representative saw the scow receive a number which was far
in excess of its privilege, and winked a politic wink and said
nothing. The passengers bore with meekness the cheat which
had been put upon them, and made no complaint.
It was like being at home in America, where abused
passengers act in just the same
way. A few days before, the
Union Company had discharged a captain for getting a boat
into danger, and had advertised this act as evidence of its
vigilance in looking
after the safety of the passengers—for
thugging a captain costs the company
nothing, but when
opportunity offered to send this dangerously overcrowded tub
to
sea and save a little trouble and a tidy penny by it, it forgot
to worry about the
passenger's safety.
The first officer told me that the Flora was privileged to
carry 125 passengers. She must have had all of 200 on board.
All the cabins were full,
all the cattle-stalls in the main stable
were full, the spaces at the heads of
companionways were full,
every inch of floor and table in the swill-room was packed
with sleeping men and remained so until the place was
required for breakfast, all
the chairs and benches on the hurricane
deck were occupied, and still there were people who had
to
walk about all night!
If the Flora had gone down that night, half of the people
on
board would have been wholly without means of escape.
The owners of that boat were not technically guilty of
conspiracy to commit murder,
but they were morally guilty
of it.
I had a cattle-stall in the main stable—a cavern fitted up
with a long
double file of two-storied bunks, the files separated
by a calico
partition—twenty men and boys on one side of it,
twenty women and girls on
the other. The place was as dark
as the soul of the Union Company, and smelt like a
kennel.
When the vessel got out into the heavy seas and began to
pitch and wallow, the cavern prisoners became immediately
sea-sick, and then the peculiar results that ensued laid all my
previous experiences of the kind well away in the shade.
And the wails, the groans, the cries,
the shrieks, the strange ejaculations—it
was wonderful.
CATTLE STALLS ON THE FLORA.
The women and children
and some of the men
and boys spent the
night in
that place, for
they were too ill to
leave it; but the rest
of us got up, by
and
by, and finished the
night on the hurricane-deck.
That boat was the
foulest I was ever in;
and the smell of the
breakfast
saloon when
we threaded our way
among the layers of
steaming passengers
stretched upon its floor and its tables was incomparable for
efficiency.
A good many of us got ashore at the first way-port to seek
another ship. After a wait
of three hours we got good rooms
in the Mahinapua, a wee little
bridal-parlor of a boat—only
205 tons burthen; clean and comfortable; good
service; good
beds; good table, and no crowding. The seas danced her
about like a
duck, but she was safe and capable.
Next morning early she went through the French Pass—a
narrow gateway of
rock, between bold headlands—so narrow,
in fact, that it seemed no wider than a street. The current
tore through there like a mill-race, and the boat darted
through like a telegram. The passage was made in half a
minute; then we were in a wide place where noble vast eddies
swept grandly round and round in shoal water, and I wondered
what they would do with the little boat. They did as
they pleased with her. They picked her up and flung her
around like nothing and landed her gently on the solid, smooth
bottom of sand—so gently, indeed, that we barely felt her
touch it, barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill.
The water was as clear as glass, the sand on the bottom was
vividly distinct, and the fishes seemed to be swimming about
in nothing. Fishing lines were brought out, but before we
could bait the hooks the boat was off and away again.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the "blessing"
of
idleness and won for us the "curse" of labor.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
soon reached the town of Nelson, and spent the
most of
the day there, visiting acquaintances and
driving with them about the
garden—the whole
region is a garden, excepting the scene of the "Maungatapu
Murders," of thirty years ago. That is a wild place—wild and
lonely; an
ideal place for a murder. It is at the base of a
vast, rugged, densely timbered
mountain. In the deep twilight
of that forest solitude four desperate
rascals—Burgess,
Sullivan, Levy, and Kelley—ambushed themselves
beside the
mountain trail to murder and rob four travelers—Kempthorne,
Mathieu, Dudley, and De Pontius, the latter a New Yorker.
A harmless old laboring man
came wandering along, and as his
presence was an embarrassment, they choked him, hid
him, and
then resumed their watch for the four. They had to wait a
while, but
eventually everything turned out as they desired.
That dark episode is the one large event in the history of
Nelson. The fame of it
traveled far. Burgess made a confession.
It is a
remarkable paper. For brevity, succinctness,
and concentration, it is perhaps without
its peer in the literature
of murder. There are no waste words in it; there is no
obtrusion of matter not
pertinent to the occasion, nor any departure
from the dispassionate tone proper to a formal business
statement—for
that is what it is: a business statement of a
murder, by the chief engineer of it, or
superintendent, or foreman,
or whatever one may prefer to
call him.
"We were getting impatient, when we saw four men and a pack-horse
coming. I left my
cover and had a look at the men, for Levy had told me
that Mathieu was a small man and
wore a large beard, and that it was a chestnut
horse. I said, 'Here they come.' They were then a good distance
away; I took the
caps off my gun, and put fresh ones on. I said, 'You
keep where you are, I'll put them
up, and you give me your gun while you
tie them.' It was arranged as I have described.
The men came; they
arrived within about fifteen yards when I stepped up and said,
'Stand! bail
up!' That means all of them to get together. I made them fall back on the
upper side of the road with their faces up the range, and Sullivan brought
me his
gun, and then tied their hands behind them. The horse was very
quiet all the time, he
did not move. When they were all tied, Sullivan took
the horse up the hill, and put him
in the bush; he cut the rope and let the
swags*
A "swag" is a kit, a pack, small baggage.
fall on the ground, and then came to me. We then marched the mendown the incline to the creek; the water at this time barely running. Up
this creek we took the men; we went, I daresay, five or six hundred yards
up it, which took us nearly half-an-hour to accomplish. Then we turned to
the right up the range; we went, I daresay, one hundred and fifty yards
from the creek, and there we sat down with the men. I said to Sullivan, 'Put
down your gun and search these men,' which he did. I asked them their
several names; they told me. I asked them if they were expected at Nelson.
They said, 'No.' If such their lives would have been spared. In money
we took £60 odd. I said, 'Is this all you have? You had better tell me.'
Sullivan said, 'Here is a bag of gold.' I said, 'What's on that pack-horse?
Is there any gold?' when Kempthorne said, 'Yes, my gold is in the portmanteau,
and I trust you will not take it all.' 'Well,' I said, 'we must take
you away one at a time, because the range is steep just here, and then we will
let you go.' They said, 'All right,' most cheerfully. We tied their feet, and
took Dudley with us; we went about sixty yards with him. This was
through a scrub. It was arranged the night previously that it would be best
to choke them, in case the report of the arms might be heard from the road,
and if they were missed they never would be found. So we tied a handkerchief
over his eyes, when Sullivan took the sash off his waist, put it round
his neck, and so strangled him. Sullivan, after I had killed the old laboring
man, found fault with the way he was choked. He said, 'The next we do
I'll show you my way.' I said, 'I have never done such a thing before. I
have shot a man, but never choked one.' We returned to the others, when
Kempthorne said, 'What noise was that?' I said it was caused by breaking
through the scrub. This was taking too much time, so it was agreed to shoot
them. With that I said, 'We'll take you no further, but separate you, and
then loose one of you, and he can relieve the others.' So with that, Sullivan
took De Pontius to the left of where Kempthorne was sitting. I took
Mathieu to the right. I tied a strap round his legs, and shot him with a revolver.
He yelled, I ran from him with my gun in my hand, I sighted
Kempthorne, who had risen to his feet. I presented the gun, and shot him
behind the right ear; his life's blood welled from him, and he died instantaneously.
Sullivan had shot De Pontius in the meantime, and then came to
me. I said, 'Look to Mathieu,' indicating the spot where he lay. He shortly
returned and said, 'I had to "chiv" that fellow, he was not dead,' a cant word,
meaning that he had to stab him. Returning to the road we passed where
De Pontius lay and was dead Sullivan said, 'This is the digger, the others
were all storekeepers; this is the digger, let's cover him up, for should the
others be found, they'll think he done it and sloped,' meaning he had gone.
So with that we threw all the stones on him, and then left him. This bloody
work took nearly an hour and a half from the time we stopped the men."
Anyone who reads that confession will think that the man
who wrote it was destitute of
emotions, destitute of feeling.
That is partly true. As regarded others he was plainly
without
feeling—utterly cold and pitiless; but as regarded himself
the case was different. While he cared nothing for the
future of the murdered men,
he cared a great deal for his
own. It makes one's flesh creep to read the introduction
to
his confession. The judge on the bench characterized it as
"scandalously
blasphemous," and it certainly reads so, but
Burgess meant no blasphemy. He was merely a
brute, and
whatever he said or wrote was sure to expose the fact. His
redemption
was a very real thing to him, and he was as jubilantly
happy on the gallows as ever was Christian martyr at
the stake. We dwellers in
this world are strangely made, and
mysteriously circumstanced. We have to suppose that
the
murdered men are lost, and that Burgess is saved; but we
cannot suppress our
natural regrets:
"Written in my dungeon drear this 7th of August, in the year of Grace, 1866.
To God
be ascribed all power and glory in subduing the rebellious spirit of a
most guilty
wretch, who has been brought, through the instrumentality of a
faithful follower of
Christ, to see his wretched and guilty state, inasmuch as
hitherto he has led an awful
and wretched life, and through the assurance of
this faithful soldier of Christ, he has
been led and also believes that Christ will
yet receive and cleanse him from all his
deep-dyed and bloody sins. I lie
under the imputation which says, 'Come now and let us
reason together,
saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white
as
snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.' On this
promise
I rely."
We sailed in the afternoon late, spent a few hours at New
Plymouth, then sailed again and reached Auckland the next
day, November 20th, and remained in that fine city several
days. Its situation is commanding, and the sea-view is superb.
There are charming drives all about, and by courtesy of friends
we had opportunity to enjoy them. From the grassy crater-summit
of Mount Eden one's eye ranges over a grand sweep
and variety of scenery—forests clothed in luxuriant foliage,
rolling green fields, conflagrations of flowers, receding and
dimming stretches of green plain, broken by lofty and symmetrical
old craters—then the blue bays twinkling and sparkling
away into the dreamy distances where the mountains loom
spiritual in their veils of haze.
It is from Auckland that one goes to Rotorua, the region of
the renowned hot lakes and
geysers—one of the chief wonders
of New Zealand; but I was not well enough to make the
trip. The government has a
sanitorium there, and everything
is comfortable for the tourist and the invalid. The
government's
official physician is almost over-cautious in his estimates
of the efficacy of the
baths, when he is talking about rheumatism,
gout,
paralysis, and such things; but when he is talking
about the effectiveness of the waters
in eradicating the whisky-habit,
he seems to have no
reserves. The baths will cure the
drinking-habit no matter how chronic it
is—and cure it so
effectually that even the desire to
drink intoxicants will come
no more. There should be a rush from Europe and America
to that place; and when the victims of alcoholism find out
what they can get by
going there, the rush will begin.
The Thermal-springs District of New Zealand comprises an
area of upwards of 600,000
acres, or close on 1,000 square
miles. Rotorua is the favorite place. It is the center
of a
rich field of lake and mountain scenery; from Rotorua as a base
the
pleasure-seeker makes excursions. The crowd of sick people
is great, and growing.
Rotorua is the Carlsbad of Australasia.
HOT SPRINGS, AND GEYSERS.
It is from Auckland that the Kauri gum is shipped. For a
long time now about 8,000
tons of it have been brought into
the town per year. It is worth about $300 per ton,
unassorted;
assorted, the finest grades are worth about $1,000. It goes to
America, chiefly. It is in lumps, and is hard and smooth, and
looks like
amber—the light-colored like new amber, and the
dark brown like rich old
amber. And it has the pleasant feel
of amber, too. Some of the light-colored samples
were a tolerably
fair counterfeit of uncut South African diamonds, they
were so perfectly smooth
and polished and transparent. It is
manufactured into varnish; a varnish which answers
for copal
varnish and is cheaper.
The gum is dug up out of the ground; it has been there
for ages. It is the sap of the
Kauri tree. Dr. Campbell of
Auckland told me he sent a cargo of it to England fifty
years
ago, but nothing came of the venture. Nobody knew what to
do with it; so it
was sold at £5 a ton, to light fires with.
November 26—3 P. M., sailed. Vast and beautiful harbor.
Land all about for hours. Tangariwa, the mountain that "has
the same shape from
every point of view." That is the common
belief in Auckland. And so it has—from every point of
view except
thirteen. . . . Perfect summer weather.
Large school of whales in the distance. Nothing
could be
daintier than the puffs of vapor they spout up, when seen
against the
pink glory of the sinking sun, or against the dark
mass of an island reposing in the
deep blue shadow of a stormcloud.
. . . Great Barrier
rock standing up out of the sea
away to the left. Sometime ago a ship hit it full speed
in a
fog—20 miles out of her course—140 lives lost; the captain
committed suicide without waiting a moment. He knew that,
whether he was to blame
or not, the company owning the vessel
would discharge him and make a devotion-to-passengers'safety
advertisement out of it, and his chance to make a livelihood
would be permanently gone.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds
than none
at all.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
27. To-day we reached Gisborne, and
anchored in a
big bay; there was a heavy sea on, so
we remained on board.
We were a mile from shore; a little steam-tug put out
from the land; she was an object
of thrilling interest; she
would climb to the summit of a billow, reel drunkenly there a
moment, dim and gray in the driving storm of spindrift, then
make a plunge like a
diver and remain out of sight until one
had given her up, then up she would dart again,
on a steep
slant toward the sky, shedding Niagaras of water from her
forecastle—and this she kept up, all the way out to us. She
brought
twenty-five passengers in her stomach—men and
women—mainly a
traveling dramatic company. In sight on
deck were the crew, in sou'westers, yellow
waterproof canvas
suits, and boots to the thigh. The deck was never quiet for
a
moment, and seldom nearer level than a ladder, and noble
were the seas which leapt
aboard and went flooding aft. We
rove a long line to the yard-arm, hung a most primitive
basket-chair
to it and swung it out into the spacious air of heaven,
and there it swayed,
pendulum-fashion, waiting for its chance
—then down it shot, skillfully
aimed, and was grabbed by the
two men on the forecastle. A young fellow belonging to our
crew was in the chair, to be a protection to the lady-comers.
At once a couple of
ladies appeared from below, took seats in
his lap, we hoisted them into the sky, waited
a moment till the
PROTECTING THE LADIES.
roll of the ship brought them in, overhead, then we lowered
suddenly away, and seized the chair as it struck the deck.
We took the twenty-five aboard, and delivered twenty-five
into the tug—among them several aged ladies, and one blind
one—and all without accident. It was a fine piece of work.
Ours is a nice ship, roomy, comfortable, well-ordered, and
satisfactory. Now and then
we step on a rat in a hotel, but
we have had no rats on shipboard lately; unless,
perhaps in
the Flora; we had more serious things to think of
there, and
did not notice. I have noticed that it is only in ships and
hotels
which still employ the odious Chinese gong, that you
find rats. The reason would seem to
be, that as a rat cannot
tell the time of day by a clock, he won't stay where he cannot
find out when dinner is ready.
November 29. The doctor tells me of several old drunkards,
one spiritless loafer, and several far-gone moral
wrecks
who have been reclaimed by the Salvation Army and have remained
staunch people and hard workers these two years.
Wherever one goes, these
testimonials to the Army's efficiency
are forthcoming. . . . This morning we had one of
those
whizzing green Ballarat flies in the room, with his stunning
buzz-saw
noise—the swiftest creature in the world except the
lightning-flash. It is a
stupendous force that is stored up in
that little body. If we had it in a ship in the
same proportion,
we could spin from Liverpool to New York in the space of an
hour—the time it takes to eat luncheon. The New Zealand
express train is
called the Ballarat Fly. . . . Bad teeth in
the colonies. A citizen told me they don't
have teeth filled,
but pull them out and put in false ones, and that now and then
one sees a young lady with a full set. She is fortunate. I
wish I had been born with
false teeth and a false liver and
false carbuncles. I should get along better.
December 2. Monday. Left Napier in the Ballarat Fly—
the one that goes twice a week. From Napier to Hastings,
twelve miles; time, fifty-five minutes—not so far short of
thirteen miles an hour. . . . A perfect summer day; cool
breeze, brilliant sky, rich vegetation. Two or three times during
the afternoon we saw wonderfully dense and beautiful
forests, tumultuously piled skyward on the broken highlands
—not the customary roof-like slant of a hillside, where the
trees are all the same height. The noblest of these trees were of
the Kauri breed, we were told—the timber that is now furnishing
the wood-paving for Europe, and is the best of all wood for
that purpose. Sometimes these towering upheavals of forestry
were festooned and garlanded with vine-cables, and sometimes
the masses of undergrowth were cocooned in another sort of
vine of a delicate cobwebby texture—they call it the "supplejack,"
I think. Tree ferns everywhere— a stem fifteen feet
high, with a graceful chalice of fern-fronds sprouting from its
top—a lovely forest ornament. And there was a ten-foot
reed with a flowing suit of what looked like yellow hair hanging
from its upper end. I do not know its name, but if there
is such a thing as a scalp-plant, this is it. A romantic gorge,
with a brook flowing in its bottom, approaching Palmerston
North.
Waitukurau. Twenty minutes for luncheon. With me
sat my wife
and daughter, and my manager, Mr. Carlyle
Smythe. I sat at the head of the table, and
could see the
right-hand wall; the others had their backs to it. On that
wall, at
a good distance away, were a couple of framed
pictures. I could not see them clearly,
but from the groupings
of the figures I fancied that they represented the killing
of Napoleon Ill's son
by the Zulus in South Africa. I broke
into the conversation, which was about poetry and
cabbage
and art, and said to my wife—
"Do you remember when the news came to Paris—"
"Of the killing of the Prince?"
(Those were the very words I had in my mind.) "Yes,
but what Prince?"
"Napoleon. Lulu."
"What made you think of that?"
"I don't know."
There was no collusion. She had not seen the pictures, and
they had not been
mentioned. She ought to have thought
of some recent news that
came to Paris, for we were but seven
months from there and had been living there a
couple of years
when we started on this trip; but instead of that she thought
of
an incident of our brief sojourn in Paris of sixteen years
before.
Here was a clear case of mental telegraphy; of mind-transference;
of my mind telegraphing a thought into hers. How
do I know?
Because I telegraphed an error. For it turned
out that the
pictures did not represent the killing of Lulu at all,
nor anything connected with Lulu.
She had to get the error
from my head—it existed nowhere else.
CHAPTER XXXV.
The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth;
but he
cannot stop a sneeze.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
December 3. A pleasant trip, yesterday,
per Ballarat Fly. Four
hours. I do not know the
distance, but it must have been well along toward
fifty
miles. The Fly could have spun it out to eight hours and
not discommoded me; for where
there is comfort, and no need
for hurry, speed is of no value—at least to me;
and nothing
that goes on wheels can be more comfortable, more satisfactory,
than the New Zealand trains. Outside of America there
are no
cars that are so rationally devised. When you add the
constant presence of charming
scenery and the nearly constant
absence of dust—well, if one is not content
then, he ought to
get out and walk. That would change his spirit, perhaps? I
think
so. At the end of an hour you would find him waiting
humbly beside the track, and glad
to be taken aboard again.
Much horseback riding, in and around this town; many
comely girls in cool and pretty
summer gowns; much Salvation
Army; lots of Maoris; the faces and bodies of some of
the old ones very tastefully
frescoed. Maori Council House
over the river—large, strong, carpeted from end
to end with
matting, and decorated with elaborate wood carvings, artistically
executed. The Maoris were very polite.
I was assured by a member of the House of Representatives
that the native race is not
decreasing, but actually increasing
slightly. It is another evidence that they are a
superior breed
of savages. I do not call to mind any savage race that built
such good houses, or such strong and ingenious and scientific
fortresses, or gave so much attention to agriculture, or had
military arts and devices which so nearly approached the white
man's. These, taken together with their high abilities in boat-building,
and their tastes and capacities in the ornamental arts,
modify their savagery to a semi-civilization—or at least to
a quarter-civilization.
MAORI WOMEN WITH FEATHER ROBES.
It is a compliment to them that the British did not exterminate
them, as they did the Australians and the Tasmanians,
but were content with
subduing them, and showed no desire to
go further. And it is
another compliment
to them that the
British did not take
the whole of their
choicest
lands, but
left them a considerable
part, and then
went further and protected
them from the
rapacities of landsharks—a
protection
which the New Zealand Government still extends to them.
And it is
still another compliment to the Maoris that the
Government allows native representation
in both the legislature
and the cabinet, and gives both sexes the vote. And in
doing these things the
Government also compliments itself;
it has not been the custom of the world for
conquerors to act
in this large spirit toward the conquered.
The highest class white men who lived among the Maoris
in the earliest time had a high
opinion of them and a strong
affection for them. Among the whites of this sort was the
author of "Old New Zealand;" and Dr. Campbell of Auckland
was another. Dr. Campbell was a close friend of several
chiefs, and has many pleasant things to say of their fidelity,
their magnanimity, and their generosity. Also of their quaint
notions about the white man's queer civilization, and their
equally quaint comments upon it. One of them thought the
missionary had got everything wrong end first and upside
down. "Why, he wants us to stop worshiping and supplicating
the evil gods, and go
to worshiping and supplicating
the Good One!
There is no sense in that.
A good god is not going
to do us any harm."
NOSE RUBBING, FORM OF SALUTATION.
The Maoris had the
tabu; and had it on a
Polynesian scale of comprehensiveness
and elaboration.
Some of its features
could have been
importations from India
and Judea. Neither the
Maori
nor the Hindoo of common degree could cook by a
fire that a person of higher caste had
used, nor could the high
Maori or high Hindoo employ fire that had served a man of
low grade; if a low-grade Maori or Hindoo drank from a vessel
belonging to a high-grade man, the vessel was defiled, and
had to be destroyed.
There were other resemblances between
Maori tabu and Hindoo
caste-custom.
Yesterday a lunatic burst into my quarters and warned me
that the Jesuits were going
to "cook" (poison) me in my food,
or kill me on the stage at night. He
said a mysterious sign
◊was visible upon my posters and meant my death. He
said he saved Rev. Mr. Haweis's life by warning him that
there were three men on his platform who would kill him if he
took his eyes off them for a moment during his lecture. The
same men were in my audience last night, but they saw that
he was there. "Will they be there again to-night?" He hesitated;
then said no, he thought they would rather take a rest and
chance the poison. This lunatic has no delicacy. But he was
not uninteresting. He told me a lot of things. He said he
had "saved so many lecturers in twenty years, that they put
him in the asylum." I think he has less refinement than any
lunatic I have met.
December 8. A couple of curious war-monuments here at
Wanganui.
One is in honor of white men "who fell in defence
of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism."
Fanaticism. We Americans are
English in blood, English in
speech, English in religion, English in the essentials of
our
governmental system, English in the essentials of our civilization;
and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the
honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word
got there through lack of
heedfulness, and will not be suffered
to remain. If you carve it at Thermopylae, or
where Winkelried
died, or upon Bunker Hill monument, and read it again—
"who fell in
defence of law and order against fanaticism"—
you will perceive what the word
means, and how mischosen it
is. Patriotism is Patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot
degrade it; nothing can degrade it. Even though it be a
political mistake, and a
thousand times a political mistake,
that does not affect it; it is
honorable—always honorable,
always noble—and privileged to hold
its head up and look
the nations in the face. It is right to praise these brave white
men who fell in the Maori war—they deserve it; but the
presence of that
word detracts from the dignity of their
cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to
have spilt
their blood in a conflict with ignoble men, men not worthy
of that costly sacrifice. But the men were worthy. It was
no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they
fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely
fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of the brave
Englishmen who lie under the monument, but add to it, to say
that they died in defense of English laws and English homes
against men worthy of the sacrifice—the Maori patriots.
The other monument cannot be rectified. Except with dynamite.
It is a mistake all through, and a strangely thoughtless
one. It is a monument erected by white men to Maoris
who fell fighting with the
whites and against their own people,
in the Maori war. "Sacred to
the memory of the brave men
who fell on the 14th of May, 1864," etc. On one side are the
names of about twenty Maoris. It is not a fancy of mine; the
monument exists. I
saw it. It is an object-lesson to the rising
generation. It invites to treachery,
disloyalty, unpatriotism.
Its lesson, in frank terms is, "Desert your flag, slay your
people, burn their homes, shame your nationality—we honor
such."
December 9. Wellington. Ten hours from Wanganui by
the Fly.
December 12. It is a fine city and nobly situated. A busy
place, and full of life and movement. Have spent the three
days partly in walking about,
partly in enjoying social privileges,
and largely in
idling around the magnificent garden at
Hutt, a little distance away, around the shore.
I suppose we
shall not see such another one soon.
We are packing to-night for the return-voyage to Australia.
Our stay in New Zealand
has been too brief; still, we are not
unthankful for the glimpse which we have had of
it.
The sturdy Maoris made the settlement of the country by
the whites rather difficult.
Not at first—but later. At first
they welcomed the whites, and were eager to
trade with them
—particularly for muskets; for their pastime was internecine
war, and they greatly preferred the white man's weapons to their
own. War was their pastime—I use the word advisedly. They
often met and slaughtered each other just for a lark, and when
there was no quarrel. The author of "Old New Zealand"
mentions a case where a victorious army could have followed
up its advantage and exterminated the opposing army, but
declined to do it; explaining naïvely that "if we did that,
there couldn't be any more fighting." In another battle one
army sent word that it was out of ammunition, and would be
obliged to stop unless the opposing army would send some.
It was sent, and the fight went on.
In the early days things went well enough. The natives
sold land without clearly
understanding the terms of exchange,
and the whites bought it without being much
disturbed about
the native's confusion of mind. But by and by the Maori
began to
comprehend that he was being wronged; then there
was trouble, for he was not the man to
swallow a wrong and
go aside and cry about it. He had the Tasmanian's spirit and
endurance, and a notable share of military science besides;
and so he rose against the
oppressor, did this gallant "fanatic,"
and started a war that was not brought to a
definite end until
more than a generation had sped.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest it
cowardice.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp
is pronounced
Jackson.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, December 13. Sailed, at 3 p. m.,
in the Mararoa.
Summer seas and a good ship—life has nothing better.
Monday. Three days of paradise. Warm and
sunny and smooth; the
sea a luminous Mediterranean blue. . . .
One lolls in a long chair all day under
deck-awnings, and reads
and smokes, in measureless content. One does not read prose
at such a time, but poetry. I have been reading the poems of
Mrs. Julia A. Moore,
again, and I find in them the same grace
and melody that attracted me when they were
first published,
twenty years ago, and have held me in happy bonds ever since.
"The Sentimental Song Book" has long been out of print,
and has been forgotten by the
world in general, but not by me.
I carry it with me always—it and Goldsmith's
deathless story.
. . . Indeed, it has the same deep charm for me that the
Vicar of
Wakefield has, and I find in it the same subtle touch
—the touch that makes
an intentionally humorous episode
pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny. In
her time
Mrs. Moore was called "the Sweet Singer of Michigan," and
was best known
by that name. I have read her book through
twice to-day, with the purpose of determining
which of her
pieces has most merit, and I am persuaded that for wide
grasp and
sustained power, "William Upson" may claim
first place:
WILLIAM UPSON.
Come all good people far and near,Oh, come and see what you can hear,It's of a young man true and brave,That is now sleeping in his grave.Now, William Upson was his name—If it's not that, it's all the same—He did enlist in a cruel strife,And it caused him to lose his life.He was Perry Upson's eldest son,His father loved his noble son,This son was nineteen years of ageWhen first in the rebellion he engaged.His father said that he might go,But his dear mother she said no,"Oh! stay at home, dear Billy," she saidBut she could not turn his head.He went to Nashville, in Tennessee,There his kind friends he could not see;He died among strangers, so far away,They did not know where his body lay.He was taken sick and lived four weeks,And Oh! how his parents weep,But now they must in sorrow mourn,For Billy has gone to his heavenly home.Oh! if his mother could have seen her son,For she loved him, her darling son;If she could heard his dying prayer,It would ease her heart till she met him thereHow it would relieve his mother's heartTo see her son from this world depart,And hear his noble words of love,As he left this world for that above.Now it will relieve his mother's heart,For her son is laid in our graveyard;For now she knows that his grave is near,She will not shed so many tears.Although she knows not that it was her son,For his coffin could not be opened—It might be someone in his place,For she could not see his noble face.
December 17. Reached Sydney.
December 19. In the train. Fellow of 30 with four valises;
a
slim creature, with teeth which made his mouth look like a
neglected churchyard. He had
solidified hair—solidified with
pomatum; it was all one shell. He smoked the
most extraordinary
cigarettes—made of some kind of manure, apparently.
These and his hair
made him smell like the very nation. He
had a low-cut vest on, which exposed a deal of
frayed and
broken and unclean shirt-front. Showy studs, of imitation
gold—they had made black disks on the linen. Oversized
sleeve buttons of
imitation gold, the copper base showing
through. Ponderous watch-chain of imitation
gold. I judge
that he couldn't tell the time by it, for he asked Smythe what
time
it was, once. He wore a coat which had been gay when
it was young;
5-o'clock-tea-trousers of a light tint, and marvelously
soiled; yellow mustache with a dashing upward whirl
at the ends; foxy shoes,
imitation patent leather. He was a
novelty—an imitation dude. He would have
been a real one
if he could have afforded it. But he was satisfied with himself.
You could see it in his expression, and in all his
attitudes
and movements. He was living in a dude dreamland
where all his squalid shams were
genuine, and himself a sincerity.
It disarmed criticism,
it mollified spite, to see him so
enjoy his imitation languors, and arts, and airs, and
his studied
daintinesses of gesture and misbegotten refinements. It was
plain to
me that he was imagining himself the Prince of Wales,
and was doing everything the way
he thought the Prince
would do it. For bringing his four valises aboard and stowing
them in the nettings, he gave his porter four cents, and
lightly apologized for
the smallness of the gratuity—just with
the condescendingest little royal
air in the world. He
stretched himself out on the front seat and rested his pomatum-cake
on the middle arm, and stuck his feet out of the window,
and began to pose as the Prince and work his dreams and
languors for exhibition; and he would indolently watch the
blue films curling up from his cigarette, and inhale the stench,
and look so grateful; and would flip the ash away with the
daintiest gesture, unintentionally displaying his brass ring in
the most intentional way; why, it was as good as being in
Marlborough House itself to see him do it so like.
SO LIKE THE PRINCE.
There was other
scenery in the trip.
That of the Hawksbury
river, in the National
Park region,
fine—extraordinarily
fine, with spacious
views of stream and
lake imposingly
framed in woody hills;
and every now
and
then the noblest groupings
of mountains, and
the most enchanting
re-arrangements of the
water
effects. Further along, green flats, thinly covered with
gum forests, with here and
there the huts and cabins of small
farmers engaged in raising children. Still further
along, arid
stretches, lifeless and melancholy. Then Newcastle, a rushing
town,
capital of the rich coal regions. Approaching Scone,
wide farming and grazing levels,
with pretty frequent glimpses
of a troublesome plant—a particularly devilish
little prickly
pear, daily damned in the orisons of the agriculturist; imported
by a lady of sentiment, and contributed gratis to the colony.
. . . Blazing hot, all
day.
December 20. Back to Sydney. Blazing hot again. From
the newspaper, and from the map, I have made a collection of
curious names of Australasian towns, with the idea of making
a poem out of them: TumutWaitpingaWollongongTakeeGoelwaWoolloomoolooMurriwillumbaMunno ParaBombolaBowralNangkitaCoolgardieBallaratMypongaBendigoMullengudgeryKapundaCoonambleMurrurundiKooringaCootamundraWagga-WaggaPenolaWoolgoolgaWyalongNangwarryMittagongMurrumbidgeeKongorongJamberooGoomerooComaumKondoparingaWollowayKoolywurtieKuitpoWangaryKillanoolaTungkilloWanillaNaracoorteOukaparingaWorrowMuloowurtieTalungaKoppioBinnumYatalaYankalillaWallarooParawirraYaranyackaWirregaMooroorooYackamoorundieMundooraWhangareiKaiwakaHaurakiWoolundungaCoomoorooRangiririBoolerooTaurangaTeawamutePernattyGeelongTaranakiParramattaTongariroToowoombaTaroomKaikouraGoondiwindiNarranderaWakatipuJerrilderieDeniliquinOohiparaWhangaroaKawakawa.
It may be best to build the poem now, and make the
weather help:
(To be read soft and low, with the lights turned down.)
The Bombola faints in the hot Bowral tree,Where fierce Mullengudgery's smothering firesFar from the breezes of CoolgardieBurn ghastly and blue as the day expires;And Murriwillumba complaineth in songFor the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo,And the Ballarat Fly and the lone WollongongThey dream of the gardens of Jamberoo;TOWN POETRY.The wallabi sighs for the Murrubidgee,For the velvety sod of the Munno Parah,Where the waters of healing from MuloowurtieFlow dim in the gloaming by Yaranyackah;The Koppio sorrows for lost Wolloway,And sigheth in secret for Murrurundi,The Whangeroo wombat lamenteth the dayThat made him an exile from Jerrilderie;The Teawamute Tumut from Wirrega's glade,The Nangkita swallow, the Wallaroo swan,They long for the peace of the Timaru shadeAnd thy balmy soft airs, O sweet Mittagong!The Kooringa buffalo pants in the sun,The Kondoparinga lies gaping for breath,The Kongorong Camaum to the shadow has won,But the Goomeroo sinks in the slumber of death;In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plainThe Yatala Wangary withers and dies,And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain,To the Woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies;Sweet Nangwarry's desolate, Coonamble wails,And Tungkillo Kuito in sables is drest,For the Whangerei winds fall asleep in the sailsAnd the Booleroo life-breeze is dead in the west.Mypongo, Kapunda, O slumber no more!Yankalilla, Parawirra, be warned!There's death in the air! Killanoola, whereforeShall the prayer of Penola be scorned?Cootamundra, and Takee, and Wakatipu,Toowoomba, Kaikoura are lost!From Onkaparinga to far OamaruAll burn in this hell's holocaust!Paramatta and Binnum are gone to their restIn the vale of Tapanni Taroom,Kawakawa, Deniliquin—all that was bestIn the earth are but graves and a tomb!Narrandera mourns, Cameroo answers notWhen the roll of the scathless we cry:Tongariro, Goondiwindi, Woolundunga, the spotIs mute and forlorn where ye lie.
Those are good words for poetry. Among the best I have
ever seen. There are 81 in the
list. I did not need them all,
but I have knocked down 66 of them; which is a good bag, it
seems to me, for a person not in the business. Perhaps a poet
laureate could do better, but a poet laureate gets wages, and
that is different. When I write poetry I do not get any wages;
often I lose money by it. The best word in that list, and the
most musical and gurgly, is Woolloomoolloo. It is a place
near Sydney, and is a favorite pleasure-resort. It has eight
O's in it.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment
of it will do.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, December 23, 1895. Sailed from
Sydney for
Ceylon in the P. & O. steamer Oceana. A Lascar
crew mans this ship—the first I have seen. White
cotton petticoat and
pants; barefoot; red shawl for belt;
straw cap, brimless, on head, with red scarf wound
around it;
complexion a rich dark brown; short straight black hair;
whiskers fine
and silky; lustrous and intensely black. Mild,
good faces; willing and obedient people;
capable, too; but
are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. They
are from Bombay and the coast thereabouts. . . . Left
some of the trunks in Sydney, to
be shipped to South Africa
by a vessel advertised to sail three months hence. The
proverb
says: "Separate not yourself from your baggage." . . .
This Oceana is a stately big ship, luxuriously appointed. She
has
spacious promenade decks. Large rooms; a surpassingly
comfortable ship. The officers'
library is well selected; a
ship's library is not usually that. . . . For meals, the
bugle
call, man-of-war fashion; a pleasant change from the terrible
gong. . . .
Three big cats—very friendly loafers; they
wander all over the ship; the
white one follows the chief steward
around like a dog. There is also a basket of
kittens. One of
these cats goes ashore, in port, in England, Australia, and
India,
to see how his various families are getting along, and is
seen no more till the ship is
ready to sail. No one knows how
he finds out the sailing date, but no doubt he comes
down to
the dock every day and takes a look, and when he sees baggage
and passengers flocking in, recognizes that it is time to
get aboard. This is what the sailors believe. . . . The
Chief Engineer has been in the China and India trade thirty-three
years, and has had but three Christmases at home in that
time.… Conversational items at dinner, "Mocha! sold
all over the world! It is not true. In fact, very few foreigners
except the Emperor of Russia have ever seen a grain of it, or
ever will, while they live." Another man said: "There is no
sale in Australia for Australian wine. But it goes to France
and comes back with a French label on it, and then they buy
it." I have heard that the most of the French-labeled claret
in New York is made in California. And I remember what
Professor S. told me once about Veuve Cliquot—if that was
the wine, and I think it was. He was the guest of a great wine
merchant whose town was quite near that vineyard, and this
merchant asked him if very much V. C. was drunk in
America.
WHAT THE SAILORS BELIEVE.
"Oh, yes," said S., "a great abundance of it."
"Is it easy to be had?"
"Oh, yes—easy as water. All first and second-class hotels
have it."
"What do you pay for it?"
"It depends on the style of the hotel—from fifteen to
twenty-five francs a
bottle."
"Oh, fortunate country! Why, it's worth 100 francs right
here on the ground."
"No!"
"Yes!"
"Do you mean that we are drinking a bogus Veuve Cliquot
over there?"
"Yes—and there was never a bottle of the genuine in
America since
Columbus's time. That wine all comes from a
little bit of a patch of ground which isn't
big enough to raise
many bottles; and all of it that is produced goes every year
to one person—the Emperor of Russia. He takes the whole
crop in advance, be
it big or little."
January 4, 1896. Christmas in Melbourne, New Year's
Day in
Adelaide, and saw most of the friends again in both
places.… Lying here at
anchor all day—Albany (King
George's Sound), Western
Australia. It is a perfectly landlocked
harbor, or roadstead—spacious to look at, but not deep
water.
Desolate-looking rocks and scarred hills. Plenty of
ships arriving now, rushing to the
new gold-fields. The papers
are full of wonderful tales of the sort always to be heard
in
connection with new gold diggings. A sample: a youth staked
out a claim and
tried to sell half for £5; no takers; he stuck
to it fourteen days, starving,
then struck it rich and sold out
for £10,000. . . . About sunset, strong
breeze blowing,
got up the anchor. We were in a small deep puddle, with a
narrow
channel leading out of it, minutely buoyed, to the sea.
I stayed on deck to see how we were going to manage it with
such a big ship and such a strong wind. On the bridge our
giant captain, in uniform; at his side a little pilot in elaborately
gold-laced uniform; on the forecastle a white mate and quartermaster
or two, and a brilliant crowd of lascars standing by
for business. Our stern was pointing straight at the head of
the channel; so we must turn entirely around in the puddle—
and the wind blowing as described. It was done, and beautifully.
It was done by help of a jib. We stirred up much
mud, but did not touch the bottom. We turned right around
in our tracks—a seeming impossibility. We had several casts
of quarter-less 5, and one cast of half 4—27 feet; we were
drawing 26 astern. By the time we were entirely around and
pointed, the first buoy was not more than a hundred yards in
front of us. It was a fine piece of work, and I was the only
passenger that saw it. However, the others got their dinner;
the P. & O. Company got mine. . . . More cats developed.
Smythe says it is a British law that they must be carried; and
he instanced a case of a ship not allowed to sail till she sent
for a couple. The bill came, too: "Debtor, to 2 cats, 20 shillings."
. . . News comes that within this week Siam has
acknowledged herself to be, in effect, a French province. It
seems plain that all savage and semi-civilized countries are
going to be grabbed. . . . A vulture on board; bald, red,
queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on
his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed
flesh; dissipated look; a business-like style, a selfish,
conscienceless, murderous aspect—the very look of a professional
assassin, and yet a bird which does no murder. What
was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent
a trade as his? For this one isn't the sort that wars upon
the living, his diet is offal—and the more out of date it is the
better he likes it. Nature should give him a suit of rusty black;
then he would be all right, for he would look like an undertaker
and would harmonize with his business; whereas the way
he is now he is horribly out of true.
January 5. At 9 this morning we passed Cape Leeuwin
(lioness) and ceased from our long due-west course along the
southern
shore of Australia. Turning this extreme southwestern
corner, we now take a long straight slant nearly
N. W., without a break, for
Ceylon. As we speed northward
it will grow hotter very fast—but it isn't
chilly, now. . . .
The vulture is from the public menagerie at Adelaide—a
great
and interesting collection. It was there that we saw the baby
tiger solemnly
spreading its mouth and trying to roar like its
majestic mother. It swaggered, scowling,
back and forth on
its short legs just as it had seen her do on her long ones, and
now and then snarling viciously, exposing its teeth, with a
threatening lift of its
upper lip and bristling moustache; and
when it thought it was impressing the visitors,
it would spread
its mouth wide and do that screechy cry which it meant for a
roar,
but which did not deceive. It took itself quite seriously,
and was lovably comical. And
there was a hyena—an ugly
creature; as ugly as the tiger-kitty was pretty. It
repeatedly
arched its back and delivered itself of such a human
cry; a
startling resemblance; a cry which was just that of a grown
person badly
hurt. In the dark one would assuredly go to its
assistance—and be
disappointed. . . . Many friends of
Australasian Federation on board. They feel sure
that the good
day is not far off, now. But there seems to be a party that
would go
further—have Australasia cut loose from the British
Empire and set up
housekeeping on her own hook. It seems
an unwise idea. They point to the United States,
but it seems
to me that the cases lack a good deal of being alike. Australasia
governs herself wholly—there is no interference; and
her commerce and
manufactures are not oppressed in any way.
If our case had been the same we should not have gone out
when we did.
January 13. Unspeakable hot. The equator is arriving
again. We
are within eight degrees of it. Ceylon present.
Dear me, it is beautiful! And most
sumptuously tropical, as
to character of foliage and opulence of it. "What though the
spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle"—an eloquent line, an
incomparable line; it says little, but conveys whole libraries of
sentiment, and
Oriental charm and mystery, and tropic
deliciousness—a line that quivers and
tingles with a thousand
unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one
and find no articulate voice. . . . Colombo, the capital.
An Oriental town, most
manifestly; and fascinating. . . .
In this palatial ship the passengers dress for
dinner. The
ladies' toilettes make a fine display of color, and this is in
keeping
with the elegance of the vessel's furnishings and the
flooding brilliancies of the
electric light. On the stormy
Atlantic one never sees a man in evening dress, except at
the
rarest intervals; and then there is only one, not two; and he
shows up but
once on the voyage—the night before the ship
makes port—the night
when they have the "concert" and do
the amateur wailings and recitations. He is the
tenor, as a
rule. . . . There has been a deal of cricket-playing on
board; it
seems a queer game for a ship, but they enclose the
promenade deck with nettings and
keep the ball from flying
overboard, and the sport goes very well, and is properly
violent
and exciting. . . . We must part from this vessel here.
January 14. Hotel Bristol. Servant Brompy. Alert,
gentle,
smiling, winning young brown creature as ever was.
Beautiful shining black hair combed
back like a woman's, and
knotted at the back of his head—tortoise-shell comb
in it,
sign that he is a Singhalese; slender, shapely form; jacket;
under it is a
beltless and flowing white cotton gown—from
SERVANT BROMPY.
neck straight to heel; he and his outfit quite unmasculine. It
was an embarassment to undress before him.
We drove to the market, using the Japanese jinriksha—
our first
acquaintanceship with it. It is a light cart, with a
native to draw it. He makes good
speed for half-an-hour, but
it is hard work for him; he is too slight for it. After the
half-hour there is no more pleasure for you; your attention is
all on the man,
just as it would be on a tired horse, and
necessarily your sympathy is there too.
There's a plenty of
these 'rickshas, and the tariff is incredibly cheap.
I was in Cairo years ago. That was Oriental, but there
was a lack. When you are in
Florida or New Orleans you are
in the South—that is granted; but you are not
in the South;
you are in a modified South, a tempered South.
Cairo was
a tempered Orient—an Orient with an indefinite something
wanting. That feeling was not present in Ceylon. Ceylon
was Oriental in the last measure
of completeness—utterly
Oriental; also utterly tropical; and indeed to one's
unreasoning
spiritual sense the two things belong together. All the
requisites were present.
The costumes were right; the black
and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were
right;
the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose,
and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to
foliage and
ripe fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants
and flowers familiar to one on
books but in no other way—
celebrated, desirable, strange, but in production
restricted to
the hot belt of the equator; and out a little way in the country
were the proper deadly snakes, and fierce beasts of prey, and
the wild elephant and the
monkey. And there was that swoon
in the air which one associates with the tropics, and
that
smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and
that sudden
invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings,
—then the tumult of
crashing thunder and the downpour—
and presently all sunny and smiling again; all these things
were there; the conditions were complete, nothing was lacking.
And away off in the deeps of the jungle and in the remotenesses
of the mountains were the ruined cities and
mouldering temples, mysterious relics of the pomps of a forgotten
time and a vanished race—and this was as it should be,
also, for nothing is quite satisfyingly Oriental that lacks the
somber and impressive qualities of mystery and antiquity.
The drive through the town and out to the Gallè Face by
the seashore, what
a dream it was of tropical splendors of
bloom and blossom, and Oriental conflagrations
of costume!
The walking groups of men, women, boys, girls, babies—each
individual was a flame, each group a house afire for color.
And such stunning colors,
such intensely vivid colors, such rich
and exquisite minglings and fusings of rainbows
and lightnings!
And all harmonious, all in perfect taste;
never a discordant
note; never a color on any person swearing at another
color on him or failing to
harmonize faultlessly with the colors
of any group the wearer might join. The stuffs
were silk—
thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each piece a solid
color: a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid yellow, a
splendid purple, a
splendid ruby, deep, and rich with smouldering
fires—they swept continuously by in crowds and legions
and multitudes,
glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every
five seconds came a burst of blinding red
that made a body
catch his breath, and filled his heart with joy. And then, the
unimaginable grace of those costumes! Sometimes a woman's
whole dress was but a scarf
wound about her person and her
head, sometimes a man's was but a turban and a careless
rag
or two—in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin
showing—but always the arrangement compelled the homage
of the eye and made
the heart sing for gladness.
I can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness
ABUSED CREATURES.
of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of
harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful
brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes
and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and
restraint, and—
Just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating
dissonance was injected. Out of a missionary school came
marching, two and two,
sixteen prim and pious little Christian
black girls, Europeanly
clothed—dressed, to the last detail, as
they would have been dressed on a
summer Sunday in an
English or American village. Those clothes—oh, they were
unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute
of grace, repulsive as a shroud. I looked at my womenfolk's
clothes—just full-grown duplicates of the outrages
disguising those
poor little abused creatures—and was
ashamed to be seen in the street with
them. Then I looked at
my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street
with myself.
However, we must put up with our clothes as they are—
they have their
reason for existing. They are on us to expose
us—to advertise what we wear
them to conceal. They are a
sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a
pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the graces of
harmony and form; and
we put them on to propagate that lie
and back it up. But we do not deceive our neighbor;
and
when we step into Ceylon we realize that we have not even
deceived ourselves.
We do love brilliant colors and graceful
costumes; and at home we will turn out in a
storm to see
them when the procession goes by—and envy the wearers.
We
go to the theater to look at them and grieve that we can't
be clothed like that. We go
to the King's ball, when we get a
chance, and are glad of a sight of the splendid
uniforms and
the glittering orders. When we are granted permission to
attend an imperial drawing-room we shut ourselves up in
private and parade around in the theatrical court-dress by the
hour, and admire ourselves in the glass, and are utterly happy;
and every member of every governor's staff in democratic
America does the same with his grand new uniform—and if
he is not watched he will get himself photographed in it, too.
When I see the Lord Mayor's footman I am dissatisfied with
my lot. Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been nothing
short of that these hundred years. They are insincere, they
are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward
sham and a moral decay.
The last little brown boy I chanced to notice in the crowds
and swarms of Colombo had
nothing on but a twine string
around his waist, but in my memory the frank honesty of
his
costume still stands out in pleasant contrast with the odious
flummery in
which the little Sunday-school dowdies were
masquerading.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
—14th. Sailed in the Rosetta. This is a
poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk.
As
in the Oceana, just so here: everybody dresses for
dinner; they make it a sort of pious duty. These fine and
formal costumes are a rather
conspicuous contrast to the
poverty and shabbiness of the surroundings. . . . If you
want a slice of a lime at four o'clock tea, you must sign an
order on the bar.
Limes cost 14 cents a barrel.
January 18th. We have been running up the Arabian
Sea,
latterly. Closing up on Bombay now, and due to arrive
this evening.
January 20th. Bombay! A bewitching place, a bewildering
place, an enchanting place—the Arabian Nights come
again! It is a vast
city; contains about a million inhabitants.
Natives, they are, with a slight sprinkling
of white people—
not enough to have the slightest modifying effect upon the
massed dark complexion of the public. It is winter here, yet
the weather is the
divine weather of June, and the foliage is the
fresh and heavenly foliage of June. There
is a rank of noble
great shade trees across the way from the hotel, and under
them
sit groups of picturesque natives of both sexes; and the
juggler in his turban is there
with his snakes and his magic;
and all day long the cabs and the multitudinous varieties
of
costumes flock by. It does not seem as if one could ever get
tired of watching
this moving show, this shining and shifting
spectacle. . . . In the great bazar the pack
and jam of
natives was marvelous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and
draperies an inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy Indian
architecture was just the right setting for it. Toward sunset
another show; this is the drive around the sea-shore to Malabar
Point, where Lord Sandhurst, the Governor of the Bombay
Presidency, lives. Parsee palaces all along the first part
of the drive; and past them all the world is driving; the
private carriages of wealthy Englishmen and natives of rank
are manned by a driver and three footmen in stunning oriental
liveries—two of these turbaned statues standing up behind, as
fine as monuments. Sometimes even the public carriages
have this superabundant crew, slightly modified—one to
drive, one to sit by and see it done, and one to stand up
behind and yell—yell when there is anybody in the way, and
for practice when there isn't. It all helps to keep up the liveliness
and augment the general sense of swiftness and energy
and confusion and pow-wow.
In the region of Scandal Point—felicitous name—where
there are
handy rocks to sit on and a noble view of the sea on
the one hand, and on the other the
passing and repassing
whirl and tumult of gay carriages, are great groups of comfortably-off
Parsee women—perfect flower-beds of brilliant color,
a fascinating
spectacle. Tramp, tramp, tramping along the
road, in singles, couples, groups, and
gangs, you have the
working-man and the working-woman—but not clothed like
ours. Usually the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not
a rag on but his
loin-handkerchief; his color a deep dark
brown, his skin satin, his rounded muscles
knobbing it as if it
had eggs under it. Usually the woman is a slender and
shapely
creature, as erect as a lightning-rod, and she has but
one thing on—a
bright-colored piece of stuff which is wound
about her head and her body down nearly
half-way to her
knees, and which clings like her own skin. Her legs and feet
are bare, and so are her arms, except for her fanciful bunches
of loose silver rings on her ankles and on her arms. She has
jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also, and showy
cluster-rings on her toes. When she undresses for bed she
takes off her jewelry, I suppose. If she took off anything
more she would catch cold. As a rule she has a large shiney
brass water-jar of graceful
shape on her head, and
one of her naked arms
curves up and the hand
holds it there. She is so
straight, so erect, and she
steps with such style, and
such easy grace and dignity;
and her curved arm
and her brazen jar are
such a help to the picture
—indeed, our workingwomen
cannot begin with
her as a road-decoration.
A ROAD-DECORATION.
It is all color, bewitching
color, enchanting
color—everywhere all
around—all the
way
around the curving great
opaline bay clear to Government House, where the
turbaned
big native chuprassies stand grouped in state at the
door in
their robes of fiery red, and do most properly and stunningly
finish up
the splendid show and make it theatrically complete.
I wish I were a chuprassy.
This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of
fabulous wealth and fabulous
poverty, of splendor and rags,
of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii
and
giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra
and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a
hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods,
cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother
of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of
tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering
antiquities of the rest of the nations—the one sole country
under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest
for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant,
wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that
all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse,
would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of
the globe combined.
Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those
days in Bombay has not left
me, and I hope never will. It
was all new, no detail of it hackneyed. And India did not
wait for morning, it began at the hotel—straight away. The
lobbies and
halls were full of turbaned, and fez'd and embroidered,
cap'd, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives,
some of them rushing about, others
at rest squatting, or
sitting on the ground; some of them chattering with energy,
others still and dreamy; in the dining-room every man's own
private native servant
standing behind his chair, and dressed
for a part in the Arabian Nights.
Our rooms were high up, on the front. A white man—
he was a burly
German—went up with us, and brought three
natives along to see to arranging
things. About fourteen others
followed in procession, with the hand-baggage; each
carried
an article—and only one; a bag, in some cases, in other cases
less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol,
another a box of cigars,
another a novel, and the last man in
the procession had no load but a fan. It was all
done with
earnestness and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession
FOURTEEN FOLLOWED.
from the head of it to the tail of it. Each man waited
patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found
time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently,
touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way. They
seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both
winning and touching about their demeanor.
There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the
balcony. It needed closing, or
cleaning, or something, and a
native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He
seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for
the burly German put
on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction,
then without explaining
what was wrong, gave the native a
brisk cuff on the jaw and then
told him where the defect was.
It seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The
native
took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his
face or
manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of
this for fifty years. It carried me
back to my boyhood, and
flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual
way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to remember
that the method seemed right and natural to me in
those days, I being born to it
and unaware that elsewhere e
were other methods; but I was also able to remember that
those unresented cuffings
made me sorry for the victim and
ashamed for the punisher. My father was a refined and
kindly
gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a
sternly just and
upright man, albeit he attended no church and
never spoke of religious matters, and had
no part nor lot in
the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to
suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in
punishment only twice in his
life, and then not heavily; once
for telling him a lie—which surprised me,
and showed me
how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.
He
punished me those two times only, and never any other
member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed
our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and
awkardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves
from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom
of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old
I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slave-man in anger,
for merely doing something awkwardly—as if that were a
crime. It bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell and
never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man
had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed
a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was
not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.
Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course
no one said much about it.
It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought.
For just one second,
all that goes to make the me in me was
in a Missourian village,
on the other side of the globe, vividly
seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty
years ago, and
wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next
second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native's
smitten cheek was not done
tingling yet! Back to boyhood
—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty;
and a flight
equal to the circumference of the globe—all in two seconds
by the watch!
Some natives—I don't remember how many—went into
my bedroom,
now, and put things to rights and arranged the
mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to nurse
my cough. It was
about nine in the evening. What a state of things! For three
hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued,
along with the velvety
patter of their swift bare feet—what a
racket it was! They were yelling
orders and messages down
three flights. Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a
riot, an insurrection, a revolution. And then there were other
noises mixed up with these and at intervals tremendously
accenting them—roofs falling in, I judged, windows smashing,
persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding,
and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws
blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter
and explosions of dynamite. By midnight I had suffered
all the different kinds of shocks there are, and knew that I
could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in
combination. Then came peace—stillness deep and solemn—
and lasted till five.
Then it all broke loose again. And who re-started it?
The Bird of Birds—the
Indian crow. I came to know him
well, by and by, and be infatuated with him. I suppose
he is
the hardest lot that wears feathers. Yes, and the cheerfulest,
and the best
satisfied with himself. He never arrived at what
he is by any careless process, or any
sudden one; he is a work
of art, and "art is long"; he is the product of immemorial
ages, and of deep calculation; one can't make a bird like that
in a day. He has
been re-incarnated more times than Shiva;
and he has kept a sample of each incarnation,
and fused it into
his constitution. In the course of his evolutionary promotions,
his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a
gambler, a low comedian, a
dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a
blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an
informer, a trading
politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot
for cash, a reformer,
a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel,
a royalist, a democrat, a practicer and
propagator of irreverence,
a meddler, an intruder, a
busybody, an infidel, and a
wallower in sin for the mere love of it. The strange result,
the incredible result, of this patient accumulation of all damnable
traits is, that he does not know what care is, he does not
know what sorrow is, he
does not know what remorse is, his life
is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and
he will go to his
death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as
an author or something, and be even more intolerably capable
and comfortable than ever he was before.
In his straddling wide forward-step, and his springy sidewise
series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way
of canting his head to
one side upon occasion, he reminds one
of the American blackbird. But the sharp
resemblances stop
there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks
the
blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and
shapely beak; and of course his
sober garb of gray and rusty
black is a poor and humble thing compared with the splendid
lustre of the blackbird's metallic sables and shifting and flashing
bronze glories. The blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in
deportment and attire,
and is not noisy, I believe, except when
holding religious services and political
conventions in a tree;
but this Indian sham Quaker is just a rowdy, and is always
noisy when awake—always chaffing, scolding, scoffing, laughing,
ripping, and cursing, and carrying on about something
or other.
I never saw such a bird for delivering opinions.
Nothing escapes him; he notices
everything that happens, and
brings out his opinion about it, particularly if it is a
matter
that is none of his business. And it is never a mild opinion,
but always
violent—violent and profane—the presence of
ladies does not affect
him. His opinions are not the outcome
of reflection, for he never thinks about anything,
but heaves
out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is often
an
opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit
the case. But that is his way;
his main idea is to get out an
opinion, and if he stopped to think he would lose
chances.
I suppose he has no enemies among men. The whites and
Mohammedans never seemed to
molest him; and the Hindoos,
because of their religion, never take the life of any
creature,
but spare even the snakes and tigers and fleas and rats. If I
sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the
railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge closer,
little by little, till I could almost reach them; and they would
sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my
clothes, and my hair, and my complexion,
and probable character and vocation and
politics, and how I came to be in India,
and what I had been doing, and
how many
days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged
so long, and when would it probably come off, and might
OPPRESSIVELY SOCIABLE.
there be more of my sort where I came from, and when would
they be hanged,—and so on, and so on, until I could not
longer endure the embarrassment of it; then I would shoo
them away, and they would circle around in the air a little
while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently
settle on the rail and do it all over again.
They were very sociable when there was anything to eat—
oppressively so.
With a little encouragement they would come
in and light on the table and help me eat my
breakfast; and
once when I was in the other room and they found themselves
alone,
they carried off everything they could lift; and they
were particular to choose things
which they could make no use
of after they got them. In India their number is beyond
estimate,
and their noise is in proportion. I suppose they
cost the
country more than the government does; yet that is not a
light matter.
Still, they pay; their company pays; it would
sadden the land to take their cheerful
voice out of it.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
soon find your long-ago dreams of India rising in a
sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon-rim
of your opaque consciousness, and softly lighting
up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a
vision that had once been
vivid to you when you were a boy,
and steeped your spirit in tales of the East. The
barbaric
gorgeousnesses, for instance; and the princely titles, the sumptuous
titles, the sounding titles,—how good they taste in the
mouth! The
Nizam of Hyderabad; the Maharajah of Travancore;
the
Nabob of Jubbelpore; the Begum of Bhopal; the
Nawab of Mysore; the Ranee of Gulnare; the
Ahkoond of
Swat's; the Rao of Rohilkund; the Gaikwar of Baroda. Indeed,
it is a country that runs richly to name. The great god
Vishnu has
108—108 special ones—108 peculiarly holy ones
—names
just for Sunday use only. I learned the whole of
Vishnu's 108 by heart once, but they
wouldn't stay; I don't
remember any of them now but John W.
And the romances connected with those princely native
houses—to this day
they are always turning up, just as in the
old, old times. They were sweating out a
romance in an English
court in Bombay a while before we were there. In this-case
a native prince, 16½ years old, who has been enjoying his
titles and
dignities and estates unmolested for fourteen years,
is suddenly haled into court on the
charge that he is rightfully
no prince at all, but a pauper peasant; that the real
prince
died when two and one-half years old; that the death was concealed,
and a peasant child smuggled into the royal cradle, and
that this present incumbent was that smuggled substitute. This
is the very material that so many oriental tales have been made of.
The case of that great prince, the Gaikwar of Baroda, is a
reversal of the theme. When
that throne fell vacant, no heir
could be found for some time, but at last one was found
in the
person of a peasant child who was making mud pies in a village
street, and
having an innocent good time. But his pedigree
was straight; he was the true prince, and
he has reigned ever
since, with none to dispute his right.
Lately there was another hunt for an heir to another
princely house, and one was found
who was circumstanced
about as the Gaikwar had been. His fathers were traced back,
in humble life, along a branch of the ancestral tree to the point
where it joined the
stem fourteen generations ago, and his
heirship was thereby squarely established. The
tracing was
done by means of the records of one of the great Hindoo
shrines, where
princes on pilgrimage record their names and
the date of their visit. This is to keep
the prince's religious
account straight, and his spiritual person safe; but the record
has the added value of keeping the pedigree authentic, too.
When I think of Bombay now, at this distance of time, I
seem to have a kaleidoscope at
my eye; and I hear the clash of
the glass bits as the splendid figures change, and fall
apart,
and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the
birth of each
new form I feel my skin crinkle and my nerve-web
tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight. These
remembered pictures float
past me in a sequence of contracts;
following the same order always, and always whirling
by and
disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with
the sense that
the actuality was the experience of an hour, at
most, whereas it really covered days, I
think.
The series begins with the hiring of a "bearer"—native
man-servant—a person who should be selected with some care,
because as long
as he is in your employ he will be about as
near to you as your clothes.
In India your day may be said to begin with the "bearer's"
knock on the bedroom door,
accompanied by a formula of
words—a formula which is intended to mean that
the bath is
ready. It doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. But
that is
because you are not used to "bearer" English. You
will presently understand.
Where he gets his English is his own secret. There is
nothing like it elsewhere in the
earth; or even in paradise, perhaps,
but the other place is
probably full of it. You hire him
as soon as you touch Indian soil; for no matter what
your sex
is, you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid,
table-waiter, lady's maid,
courier—he is everything.
He carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt;
he sleeps on
the stone floor outside your chamber door, and gets his meals
you do
not know where nor when; you only know that he is
not fed on the premises, either when
you are in a hotel or
when you are a guest in a private house. His wages are large
—from an Indian point of view—and he feeds and clothes
himself out
of them. We had three of him in two and a half
months. The first one's rate was thirty
rupees a month—
that is to say, twenty-seven cents a day; the rate of the
others,
Rs. 40 (40 rupees) a month. A princely sum; for the native
switchman on a railway and the native servant in a private
family get only Rs. 7
per month, and the farm-hand only 4.
The two former feed and clothe themselves and their
families
on their $1.90 per month; but I cannot believe that the farmhand
has to feed himself on his $1.08. I think the farm probably
feeds him, and that the whole of his wages, except a trifle
for the priest, go to
the support of his family. That is, to the
feeding of his family; for they live in a mud hut, hand-made,
and, doubtless, rent-free, and they wear no clothes; at least,
nothing more than a rag. And not much of a rag at that, in
the case of the males. However, these are handsome times for
the farm-hand; he was not always the child of luxury that he
is now. The Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces, in
a recent official utterance wherein he was rebuking a native
deputation for complaining of hard times, reminded them that
they could easily remember when a farm-hand's wages were
only half a rupee (former value) a month—that is to say, less
than a cent a day; nearly $2.90 a year. If such a wage-earner
had a good deal of a family—and they all have that, for God
is very good to these poor natives in some ways—he would
save a profit of fifteen cents, clean and clear, out of his year's
toil; I mean a frugal, thrifty person would, not one given to
display and ostentation. And if he owed $13.50 and took good
care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety years. Then
he could hold up his head, and look his creditors in the face
again.
Think of these facts and what they mean. India does not
consist of cities. There are
no cities in India—to speak of.
Its stupendous population consists of
farm-laborers. India is
one vast farm—one almost interminable stretch of
fields with
mud fences between. Think of the above facts; and consider
what an
incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you.
The first Bearer that applied, waited below and sent up his
recommendations. That was
the first morning in Bombay.
We read them over; carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully.
There
was not a fault to find with them—except one; they were all
from
Americans. Is that a slur? If it is, it is a deserved one.
In my experience, an
American's recommendation of a servant
is not usually valuable. We are too good-natured
a race; we
hate to say the unpleasant thing; we shrink from speaking the
unkind truth about a poor fellow whose bread depends upon
our verdict; so we speak of his good points only, thus not
scrupling to tell a lie—a silent lie—for in not mentioning
his bad ones we as good as say he hasn't any. The only difference
that I know of between a silent lie and a spoken one
is, that the silent lie is a less respectable one than the other.
And it can deceive, whereas the other can't—as a rule. We
not only tell the silent lie as to a servant's faults, but we sin in
another way: we overpraise his merits; for when it comes to
writing recommendations of servants we are a nation of gushers.
And we have not the Frenchman's excuse. In France
you must give the departing servant a good recommendation;
and you must conceal his faults; you have no choice. If you
mention his faults for the protection of the next candidate for
his services, he can sue you for damages; and the court will
award them, too; and, moreover, the judge will give you a
sharp dressing-down from the bench for trying to destroy a
poor man's character, and rob him of his bread. I do not
state this on my own authority, I got it from a French physician
of fame and repute—a man who was born in Paris, and
had practiced there all his life. And he said that he spoke not
merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating personal
experience.
As I was saying, the Bearer's recommendations were all
from American tourists; and St.
Peter would have admitted
him to the fields of the blest on them—I mean if he
is as
unfamiliar with our people and our ways as I suppose he is.
According to
these recommendations, Manuel X. was supreme
in all the arts connected with his complex
trade; and these
manifold arts were mentioned—and praised—in
detail. His
English was spoken of in terms of warm admiration—admiration
verging upon rapture. I took pleased note of that, and
hoped that some of it might
be true.
We had to have some one right away; so the family went
down stairs and took him a week
on trial; then sent him up
to me and departed on their affairs. I was shut up in my
quarters with a bronchial cough, and glad to have something
fresh to look at,
something new to play with. Manuel filled
the bill; Manuel was very welcome. He was
toward fifty
years old, tall, slender, with a slight stoop—an artificial
stoop,
a deferential stoop, a stoop rigidified
by long habit—with face of
European mould; short hair intensely
black; gentle black eyes,
timid black eyes, indeed; complexion
very dark, nearly black
in fact; face smooth-shaven. He
was bareheaded and
barefooted,
and was never otherwise while his
week with us lasted; his clothing
was European, cheap, flimsy, and
showed much wear.
MANUEL.
He stood before me and inclined
his head (and body) in the pathetic
Indian way, touching his forehead
with the finger-ends of his right
hand, in
salute. I said:—
"Manuel, you are evidently Indian, but you seem to have a
Spanish name when you put it
all together. How is that?"
A perplexed look gathered in his face; it was plain that he
had not
understood—but he didn't let on. He spoke back
placidly.
"Name, Manuel. Yes, master."
"I know; but how did you get the name?"
"Oh, yes, I suppose. Think happen so. Father same
name, not mother."
I saw that I must simplify my language and spread my
words apart, if I would be
understood by this English scholar.
"Well—then—how—did—your—father—get—his—
name?"
"Oh, he,"—brightening a little—"he Christian—Portygee;
live in
Goa; I born Goa; mother not Portygee, mother
native—high-caste
Brahmin—Coolin Brahmin; highest caste;
no other so high caste. I high-caste
Brahmin, too. Christian,
too, same like father; high-caste Christian Brahmin,
master—
Salvation Army."
All this haltingly, and with difficulty. Then he had an
inspiration, and began to pour
out a flood of words that I could
make nothing of; so I said:—
"There—don't do that. I can't understand Hindostani."
"Not Hindostani, master—English. Always I speaking
English sometimes when I
talking every day all the time at you."
"Very well, stick to that; that is intelligible. It is not
up to my hopes, it is not
up to the promise of the recommendations,
still it
is English, and I understand it. Don't elaborate
it; I don't like elaborations when they
are crippled by uncertainty
of touch."
"Master?"
"Oh, never mind; it was only a random thought; I didn't
expect you to understand it.
How did you get your English;
is it an acquirement, or just a gift of God?"
After some hesitation—piously:
"Yes, he very good. Christian god very good, Hindoo
god very good, too. Two million
Hindoo god, one Christian
god—make two million and one. All mine; two million
and
one god. I got a plenty. Sometime I pray all time at those,
keep it up, go all
time every day; give something at shrine, all
good for me, make me better man; good for
me, good for my
family, dam good."
Then he had another inspiration, and went rambling off
into fervent confusions and
incoherencies, and I had to stop
him again. I thought we had talked enough, so I told
him to
go to the bathroom and clean it up and remove the slops—this
to
get rid of him. He went away, seeming to understand, and
got out some of my clothes and
began to brush them. I repeated
my desire several times, simplifying and re-simplifying
it, and at last he got the
idea. Then he went away and put a
coolie at the work, and explained that he would lose
caste if
he did it himself; it would be pollution, by the law of his caste,
and it
would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself
and accomplish his rehabilitation. He said that that kind
of work was strictly
forbidden to persons of caste, and as
strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of
Hindoo society
—the despised Sudra (the
toiler, the laborer). He was right;
and apparently the poor Sudra has been
content with his
strange lot, his insulting distinction, for ages and
ages—clear
back to the beginning of things, so to speak. Buckle says that
his name—laborer—is a term of contempt; that it is ordained
by the Institutes of Menu (900 B.C.) that if a Sudra sit
on a
level with his superior he shall be exiled or branded*
Without going into particulars I will remark that as a rule they wear no clothing
that would conceal the brand.—M.T.
if he speak contemptuously of his superior or insult him he
shall suffer death; if he listen to the reading of the sacred books
he shall have burning oil poured in his ears; if he memorize
passages from them he shall be killed; if he marry his daughter
to a Brahmin the husband shall go to hell for defiling himself
by contact with a woman so infinitely his inferior; and that it
is forbidden to a Sudra to acquire wealth. "The bulk of the
population of India," says Bucklet†
Population to-day, 300,000,000.
"is the Sudras—theworkers, the farmers, the creators of wealth."
Manuel was a failure, poor old fellow. His age was against
him. He was desperately slow and phenomenally forgetful.
When he went three blocks on an errand he would be gone
two hours, and then forget what it was he went for. When
he packed a trunk it took him forever, and the trunk's contents
were an unimaginable chaos when he got done. He couldn't
wait satisfactorily at table—a prime defect, for if you haven't
your own servant in an Indian hotel you are likely to have a
slow time of it and go away hungry. We couldn't understand
his English; he couldn't understand ours; and when we found
that he couldn't understand his own, it seemed time for us to
part. I had to discharge him; there was no help for it.
But I did it as kindly as I could, and as gently. We must
part, said I, but I hoped we should meet again in a better
world. It was not true, but it was only a little thing to say,
and saved his feelings and cost me nothing.
But now that he was gone, and was off my mind and heart,
my spirits began to rise at
once, and I was soon feeling brisk
and ready to go out and have adventures. Then his
newly-hired
successor flitted in, touched his forehead, and began to
fly around here, there,
and everywhere, on his velvet feet, and
in five minutes he had everything in the room
"ship-shape and
Bristol fashion," as the sailors say, and was standing at the
salute, waiting for orders. Dear me, what a rustler he was
after the slumbrous way of
Manuel, poor old slug! All my
heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously
to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and
compressed incarnation
of energy and force and promptness
and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily,
engaging,
shiney-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming
fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.
I said, with deep satisfaction—
"You'll suit. What is your name?"
He reeled it mellowly off.
"Let me see if I can make a selection out of it—for
business uses, I mean;
we will keep the rest for Sundays.
Give it to me in installments."
He did it. But there did not seem to be any short ones,
except Mousa—which
suggested mouse. It was out of
character; it was too soft, too quiet, too conservative;
it didn't
fit his splendid style. I considered, and said:
"Mousa is short enough, but I don't quite like it. It seems
colorless—inharmonious—inadequate; and I am sensitive to
such
things. How do you think Satan would do?"
"Yes, master. Satan do wair good."
It was his way of saying "very good."
There was a rap at the door. Satan covered the ground
with a single skip; there was a
word or two of Hindostani,
then he disappeared. Three minutes later he was before me
again, militarily erect, and waiting for me to speak first.
"What is it, Satan?"
"God want to see you."
"Who?"
"God. I show him up, master?"
"Why, this is so unusual, that—that—well, you see—
indeed I am so unprepared—I don't quite know what I do
mean. Dear me, can't you explain? Don't you see that this
is a most
ex—"
"Here his card, master."
Wasn't it curious—and amazing, and tremendous, and all
that? Such a
personage going around calling on such as I,
and sending up his card, like a
mortal—sending it up by Satan.
It was a bewildering collision of the
impossibles. But this
was the land of the Arabian Nights, this was India! and what
is it that cannot happen in India?
We had the interview. Satan was right—the Visitor was
indeed a God in the
conviction of his multitudinous followers,
and was worshiped by them in sincerity and humble adoration.
They are troubled by no doubts as to his divine origin
and office. They believe in him, they pray to him, they make
offerings to him, they beg of him remission of sins; to them
his person, together with everything connected with it, is
sacred; from his barber they buy the parings of his nails and
set them in gold, and wear them as precious amulets.
I tried to seem tranquilly conversational and at rest, but I
was not. Would you have
been? I was in a suppressed
frenzy of excitement and curiosity and glad wonder. I could
not keep my eyes off him. I was looking upon a god, an
actual god, a recognized and accepted god; and every detail of
his person and his dress
had a consuming interest for me. And
the thought went floating through my head, "He is
worshiped
—think of it—he is not a recipient of the pale homage
called compliment, wherewith the highest human clay must
make shift to be
satisfied, but of an infinitely richer spiritual
food: adoration,
worship!—men and women lay their cares
and their griefs and their broken
hearts at his feet; and he
gives them his peace, and they go away healed."
And just then the Awful Visitor said, in the simplest
way—
"There is a feature of the philosophy of Huck Finn
which"—and went
luminously on with the construction of a
compact and nicely-discriminated literary
verdict.
It is a land of surprises—India! I had had my ambitions
—I had hoped, and almost expected, to be read by kings and
presidents
and emperors—but I had never looked so high as
That. It would be false
modesty to pretend that I was not
inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased
than
I should have been with a compliment from a man.
He remained half an hour, and I found him a most courteous
and charming gentleman. The godship has been in his
family a good while, but I do not know how long. He is a
Mohammedan deity; by earthly rank he is a prince; not an
Indian but a Persian prince. He is a direct descendant of the
Prophet's line. He is comely; also young—for a god; not
forty, perhaps not above thirty-five years old. He wears his
immense honors with tranquil grace, and with a dignity proper
to his awful calling. He speaks English with the ease and
purity of a person born to it. I think I am not overstating
this. He was the only god I had ever seen, and I was very
favorably impressed. When he rose to say good-bye, the door
swung open and I caught the flash of a red fez, and heard
these words, reverently said—
"Satan see God out?"
"Yes." And these mis-mated Beings passed from view—
Satan in the lead and
The Other following after.
CHAPTER XL.
Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
next picture in my mind is Government House, on
Malabar
Point, with the wide sea-view from the windows
and broad balconies; abode of His Excellency
the Governor of the Bombay
Presidency—a residence which
is European in everything but the native guards
and servants,
and is a home and a palace of state harmoniously combined.
That was England, the English power, the English civilization,
the modern civilization—with the quiet elegancies and
quiet colors and quiet tastes and quiet dignity that are the
outcome of the modern
cultivation. And following it came a
picture of the ancient civilization of
India—an hour in the
mansion of a native prince: Kumar Schri Samatsinhji
Bahadur
of the Palitana State.
The young lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's
sister, a wee brown
sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning,
delicately
moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly,
a dear little fairyland princess,
gravely willing to be friendly
with the strangers, but in the beginning preferring to
hold her
father's hand until she could take stock of them and determine
how far
they were to be trusted. She must have been eight
years old; so in the natural
(Indian) order of things she would
be a bride in three or four years
from now, and then this free
contact with the sun and the air and the other belongings
of
out-door nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would
end, and she
would shut herself up in the zenana for life, like
her mother, and by inherited habit of mind would be happy in
that seclusion and not look upon it as an irksome restraint and
a weary captivity.
KUMAR SCHRI SAMATSINHJI
BAHADUR.
The game which the prince amuses his leisure with—however,
never mind it, I should never be able to describe it
intelligibly.
I tried to get an idea of it while my
wife and daughter
visited the princess in the zenana,
a lady of charming graces
and
a fluent speaker of English, but I
did not make it out. It is a
complicated game, and I believe
it is said that nobody can learn
to play it well
but an Indian.
And I was not able to learn how
to wind a turban. It seemed a
simple art and easy; but that
was a deception. It is a piece of
thin, delicate
stuff a foot wide or
more, and forty or fifty feet
long; and the exhibitor of the
art takes one end of it in his
two hands, and winds it in and
out
intricately about his head,
twisting it as he goes, and in a minute or two the thing is
finished, and is neat and symmetrical and fits as snugly as a
mould.
We were interested in the wardrobe and the jewels, and in
the silverware, and its
grace of shape and beauty and delicacy
of ornamentation. The silverware is kept locked up, except
at meal-times, and none
but the chief butler and the prince
have keys to the safe. I did not clearly understand
why, but
it was not for the protection of the silver. It was either to
protect the
prince from the contamination which his caste
would suffer if the vessels were touched by low-caste hands, or
it was to protect his highness from poison. Possibly it was
both. I believe a salaried taster has to taste everything before
the prince ventures it—an ancient and judicious custom in the
East, and has thinned out the tasters a good deal, for of course
it is the cook that puts the poison in. If I were an Indian
prince I would not go to the expense of a taster, I would eat
with the cook.
Ceremonials are always interesting; and I noted that the
Indian good-morning is a
ceremonial, whereas ours doesn't
amount to that. In salutation the son reverently
touches the
father's forehead with a small silver implement tipped with
vermillion
paste which leaves a red spot there, and in return
the son receives the father's
blessing. Our good morning is
well enough for the rowdy West, perhaps, but would be too
brusque for the soft and ceremonious East.
After being properly necklaced, according to custom, with
great garlands made of
yellow flowers, and provided with
betel-nut to chew, this pleasant visit closed, and we
passed
thence to a scene of a different sort: from this glow of color
and this
sunny life to those grim receptacles of the Parsee dead,
the Towers of Silence. There is
something stately about that
name, and an impressiveness which sinks deep; the hush of
death is in it. We have the Grave, the Tomb, the Mausoleum,
God's Acre, the
Cemetery; and association has made them eloquent
with solemn meaning; but we have no name that is so
majestic as that one, or
lingers upon the ear with such deep and
haunting pathos.
On lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage
and flowers, remote
from the world and its turmoil and noise,
they stood—the Towers of Silence;
and away below was
spread the wide groves of cocoa palms, then the city, mile on
mile, then the ocean with its fleets of creeping ships—all
steeped in a stillness as deep as the hush that hallowed this
high place of the dead. The vultures were there. They stood
close together in a great circle all around the rim of a massive
low tower—waiting; stood as motionless as sculptured ornaments,
and indeed almost deceived one into the belief that that
was what they were. Presently there was a slight stir among
the score of persons present, and all moved reverently out of
the path and ceased from talking. A funeral procession entered
the great gate, marching two and two, and moved
silently by, toward the Tower. The corpse lay in a shallow
shell, and was under cover of a white cloth, but was otherwise
naked. The bearers of the body were separated by an interval
of thirty feet from the mourners. They, and also the mourners,
were draped all in pure white, and each couple of mourners
was figuratively bound together by a piece of white rope or a
handkerchief—though they merely held the ends of it in
their hands. Behind the procession followed a dog, which was
led in a leash. When the mourners had reached the neighborhood
of the Tower—neither they nor any other human being
but the bearers of the dead must approach within thirty feet
of it—they turned and went back to one of the prayerhouses
within the gates, to pray for the spirit of their dead. The
bearers unlocked the Tower's sole door and disappeared from
view within. In a little while they came out bringing the bier
and the white covering-cloth, and locked the door again. Then
the ring of vultures rose, flapping their wings, and swooped
down into the Tower to devour the body. Nothing was left
of it but a clean-picked skeleton when they flocked out again
a few minutes afterward.
The principle which underlies and orders everything connected
with a Parsee funeral is Purity. By the tenets of the
Zoroastrian religion, the
elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are
sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact
with a dead
ONE OF THE TOWERS OF SILENCE.
body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they
be buried. None may touch the dead or enter the Towers
where they repose except certain men who are officially
appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs
is a dismal life, for they must live apart from their species,
because their commerce with the dead defiles them, and any
who should associate with them would share their defilement.
When they come out of the Tower the clothes they are wearing
are exchanged for others, in a building within the grounds,
and the ones which they have taken off are left behind, for
they are contaminated, and must never be used again or suffered
to go outside the grounds. These bearers come to every
funeral in new garments. So far as is known, no human being,
other than an official corpse-bearer—save one—has ever
entered a Tower of Silence after its consecration. Just a
hundred years ago a European rushed in behind the bearers
and fed his brutal curiosity with a glimpse of the forbidden
mysteries of the place. This shabby savage's name is not
given; his quality is also concealed. These two details, taken
in connection with the fact that for his extraordinary offense
the only punishment he got from the East India Company's
Government was a solemn official "reprimand"—suggest the
suspicion that he was a European of consequence. The same
public document which contained the reprimand gave warning
that future offenders of his sort, if in the Company's service,
would be dismissed; and if merchants, suffer revocation of
license and exile to England.
The Towers are not tall, but are low in proportion to their
circumference, like a
gasometer. If you should fill a gasometer
half way up with solid granite masonry, then
drive a wide
and deep well down through the center of this mass of masonry,
you
would have the idea of a Tower of Silence. On the
masonry surrounding the well the
bodies lie, in shallow trenches
which radiate like wheel-spokes from the well. The trenches
slant toward the well and carry into it the rainfall. Underground
drains, with charcoal filters in them, carry off this
water from the bottom of the well.
When a skeleton has lain in the Tower exposed to the rain
and the flaming sun a month
it is perfectly dry and clean.
Then the same bearers that brought it there come gloved
and
take it up with tongs and throw it into the well. There it
turns to dust. It
is never seen again, never touched again, in
the world. Other peoples separate their
dead, and preserve
and continue social distinctions in the grave—the
skeletons of
kings and statesmen and generals in temples and pantheons
proper to
skeletons of their degree, and the skeletons of the
commonplace and the poor in places
suited to their meaner
estate; but the Parsees hold that all men rank alike in death
—all are humble, all poor, all destitute. In sign of their
poverty they
are sent to their grave naked, in sign of their
equality the bones of the rich, the
poor, the illustrious and the
obscure are flung into the common well together. At a
Parsee
funeral there are no vehicles; all concerned must walk, both
rich and poor,
howsoever great the distance to be traversed
may be. In the wells of the Five Towers of
Silence is mingled
the dust of all the Parsee men and women and children who
have
died in Bombay and its vicinity during the two centuries
which have elapsed since the
Mohammedan conquerors drove
the Parsees out of Persia, and into that region of India.
The
earliest of the five towers was built by the Modi family something
more than 200 years ago, and it is now reserved to the
heirs of that house; none
but the dead of that blood are
carried thither.
The origin of at least one of the details of a Parsee funeral
is not now
known—the presence of the dog. Before a corpse
is borne from the house of
mourning it must be uncovered and
exposed to the gaze of a dog; a dog must also be led in the
rear of the funeral. Mr. Nusserwanjee Byramjee, Secretary to
the Parsee Punchayet, said that these formalities had once had
a meaning and a reason for their institution, but that they
were survivals whose origin none could now account for.
Custom and tradition continue them in force, antiquity hallows
them. It is thought that in ancient times in Persia the dog
was a sacred animal and could guide souls to heaven; also that
his eye had the power of purifying objects which had been
contaminated by the touch of the dead; and that hence his
presence with the funeral cortege provides an ever-applicable
remedy in case of need.
The Parsees claim that their method of disposing of the
dead is an effective
protection of the living; that it disseminates
no corruption, no impurities of any sort, no disease-germs;
that no wrap, no
garment which has touched the dead is
allowed to touch the living afterward; that from
the Towers
of Silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the outside
world. These are just claims, I think. As a sanitary
measure, their system seems
to be about the equivalent of
cremation, and as sure. We are drifting
slowly—but hopefully—toward
cremation in these days. It could not be expected
that this progress should be swift, but if it be steady
and continuous, even if
slow, that will suffice. When cremation
becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it; we
should shudder at burial if
we allowed ourselves to think what
goes on in the grave.
The dog was an impressive figure to me, representing as he
did a mystery whose key is
lost. He was humble, and apparently
depressed; and he let his head droop pensively, and
looked as if he might be
trying to call back to his mind what
it was that he had used to symbolize ages ago when
he began
his function. There was another impressive thing close at
hand, but I was not privileged to see it. That was the sacred
fire—a fire which is supposed to have been burning without
interruption for more than two centuries; and so, living by
the same heat that was imparted to it so long ago.
The Parsees are a remarkable community. There are only
about 60,000 in Bombay, and
only about half as many as that
in the rest of India; but they make up in importance
what
they lack in numbers. They are highly educated, energetic,
enterprising,
progressive, rich, and
the Jew himself is not more lavish
or catholic in his
charities and
benevolences. The Parsees build
and endow hospitals, for both men
and animals; and they and their
womenkind keep an open purse for
all great
and good objects. They
are a political force, and a valued
support to the
government. They
have a pure and lofty religion, and
they preserve it in its
integrity and
order their lives by it.
A PARSEE.
We took a final sweep of the
wonderful view of plain and city
and ocean, and so
ended our visit to the garden and the
Towers of Silence; and the last thing I noticed
was another
symbol—a voluntary symbo this one; it was a vulture
standing on the sawed-off top of a tall and slender and branchless
palm in an open space in the ground; he was perfectly
motionless, and looked like
a piece of sculpture on a pillar.
And he had a mortuary look, too, which was in keeping
with
the place.
CHAPTER XLI.
There is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty. "When you ascend
the hill
of prosperity may you not meet a friend."
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
next picture that drifts across the field of my
memory
is one which is connected with religious
things. We were taken by friends to see a Jain
temple. It was small, and had many flags or streamers flying
from poles standing
above its roof; and its little battlements
supported a great many small idols or images.
Up stairs,
inside, a solitary Jain was praying or reciting aloud in the
middle of
the room. Our presence did not interrupt him, nor
even incommode him or modify his
fervor. Ten or twelve
feet in front of him was the idol, a small figure in a sitting
posture. It had the pinkish look of a wax doll, but lacked the
doll's roundness of
limb and approximation to correctness of
form and justness of proportion. Mr. Gandhi
explained everything
to us. He was delegate to the Chicago Fair Congress of
Religions. It was lucidly
done, in masterly English, but in
time it faded from me, and now I have nothing left of
that
episode but an impression: a dim idea of a religious belief
clothed in subtle
intellectual forms, lofty and clean, barren of
fleshly grossnesses; and with this
another dim impression
which connects that intellectual system somehow with that
crude image, that inadequate idol—how, I do not know.
Properly they do not
seem to belong together. Apparently
the idol symbolized a person who had become a saint
or a god
through accessions of steadily augmenting holiness acquired
through a
series of reincarnations and promotions extending
over many ages; and was now at last a saint and qualified to
vicariously receive worship and transmit it to heaven's chancellery.
Was that it?
And thence we went to Mr. Premchand Roychand's bungalow,
in Lovelane, Byculla, where an Indian prince was to
receive a deputation of the Jain
community who desired to
congratulate him upon a high honor lately conferred upon
him by his sovereign, Victoria, Empress of India. She had
made him a knight of the order
of the Star of India. It would
seem that even the grandest Indian prince is glad to add
the
modest title "Sir" to his ancient native grandeurs, and is
willing to do
valuable service to win it. He will remit taxes
liberally, and will spend money freely
upon the betterment of
the condition of his subjects, if there is a knighthood to be
gotten by it. And he will also do good work and a deal of it
to get a gun added to
the salute allowed him by the British
Government. Every year the Empress distributes
knighthoods
and adds guns for public services done by native princes.
The salute of a small
prince is three or four guns; princes of
greater consequence have salutes that run
higher and higher,
gun by gun,—oh, clear away up to eleven; possibly more,
but
I did not hear of any above eleven-gun princes. I was told
that when a
four-gun prince gets a gun added, he is pretty
troublesome for a while, till the novelty
wears off, for he likes
the music, and keeps hunting up pretexts to get himself
saluted. It may be that supremely grand folk, like the Nyzam
of Hyderabad and the
Gaikwar of Baroda, have more than
eleven guns, but I don't know.
When we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the
ground floor was already about
full, and carriages were still
flowing into the grounds. The company present made a fine
show, an exhibition of human fireworks, so to speak, in the
matters of costume and
comminglings of brilliant color. The
variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was
remarkable. We were told that the explanation of this was,
that this Jain delegation was drawn from many parts of India,
and that each man wore the turban that was in vogue in his
own region. This diversity of turbans made a beautiful effect.
I could have wished to start a rival exhibition there, of
Christian hats and clothes.
I would have cleared one side of
the room of its Indian splendors and repacked the space
with
Christians drawn from America, England, and the Colonies,
dressed in the hats
and habits of now, and of twenty and
forty and fifty years ago. It would have been a
hideous
exhibition, a thoroughly devilish spectacle. Then there would
have been
the added disadvantage of the white complexion.
It is not an unbearably unpleasant
complexion when it keeps
to itself, but when it comes into competition with masses of
brown and black the fact is betrayed that it is endurable only
because we are used
to it. Nearly all black and brown skins
are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is
rare. How rare,
one may learn by walking down a street in Paris, New York,
or
London on a week-day—particularly an unfashionable
street—and
keeping count of the satisfactory complexions
encountered in the course of a mile. Where
dark complexions
are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out,
unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. I could
notice this as a boy, down
South in the slavery days before the
war. The splendid black satin skin of the South
African
Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection.
I can see those Zulus yet—'ricksha athletes waiting in
front of the hotel for custom; handsome and intensely black
creatures, moderately
clothed in loose summer stuffs whose
snowy whiteness made the black all the blacker by
contrast.
Keeping that group in my mind, I can compare those complexions
with the white ones which are streaming past this
London window now:
A lady. Complexion, new parchment.
Another lady. Complexion, old parchment.
Another. Pink and white, very fine.
Man. Grayish skin, with purple areas.
Man. Unwholesome fish-belly skin.
Girl. Sallow face, sprinkled with
freckles.
Old woman. Face whitey-gray.
Young butcher. Face a general red
flush.
Jaundiced man—mustard yellow.
Elderly lady. Colorless skin, with
two conspicuous moles.
Elderly man—a drinker. Boiled-cauliflower
nose in a flabby face veined
with purple crinklings.
Healthy young gentleman. Fine fresh
complexion.
Sick young man. His face a ghastly
white.
No end of people whose skins are dull and characterless
modifications of the tint
which we miscall white. Some of these
faces are pimply; some exhibit other signs of
diseased blood;
some show scars of a tint out of a harmony with the surrounding
shades of color. The white man's complexion makes no
concealments. It can't. It
seemed to have been designed as
a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies
have to
paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic,
and
enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it,
and pestering it, and fussing
at it, to make it beautiful; and
they do not succeed. But these efforts show what they
think
of the natural complexion, as distributed. As distributed it
needs these
helps. The complexion which they try to counterfeit
is one which nature restricts to the few—to the very few.
To
ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the
hundredth a good one. The
hundredth can keep it—how
long? Ten years, perhaps.
The advantage is with the Zulu, I think. He starts with a
beautiful complexion, and it
will last him through. And as
for the Indian brown—firm, smooth, blemishless,
pleasant and
restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all
colors
and adding a grace to them all—I think there is no
sort of chance for the
average white complexion against that
rich and perfect tint.
To return to the bungalow. The most gorgeous costumes
present were worn by some
children. They seemed to blaze,
so bright were the colors, and so brilliant the jewels
strung
over the rich materials. These children were professional
nautch-dancers,
and looked like girls, but they were boys.
They got up by ones and twos and fours, and
danced and sang
to an accompaniment of weird music. Their posturings and
gesturings were elaborate and graceful, but their voices were
stringently raspy and
unpleasant, and there was a good deal
of monotony about the tune.
By and by there was a burst of shouts and cheers outside
and the prince with his train
entered in fine dramatic style.
He was a stately man, he was ideally costumed, and
fairly
festooned with ropes of gems; some of the ropes were of pearls,
some were
of uncut great emeralds—emeralds renowned in
Bombay for their quality and
value. Their size was marvelous,
and enticing to the eye, those rocks. A
boy—a princeling
—was with the prince, and he also was a radiant
exhibition.
The ceremonies were not tedious. The prince strode to his
throne with the port and
majesty—and the sternness—of a
Julius
Cæsar coming to receive and receipt for a back-country
kingdom and have it over and get out, and no fooling. There
was a throne for the young
prince, too, and the two sat there,
side by side, with their officers grouped at either
hand and
most accurately and creditably reproducing the pictures which
one sees in
the books—pictures which people in the prince's
line of business have been
furnishing ever since Solomon received
the Queen of Sheba and showed her his things. The
chief of the Jain delegation
read his paper of congratulations,
then pushed it into a beautifully engraved silver
cylinder, which
was delivered with ceremony into the prince's hands and at
once
delivered by him without ceremony into the hands of an
officer. I will copy the address
here. It is interesting, as
showing what an Indian prince's subject may have opportunity
to thank him for in these days of modern English rule, as
contrasted with what his
ancestor would have given them
opportunity to thank him for a century and a half
ago—the
days of freedom unhampered by English interference. A century
and a half ago an address of thanks could have been put
into small space. It would
have thanked the prince—
bringing famine upon them;3. For not upon empty pretext destroying the rich and seizing their
property;
4. For not killing, blinding, imprisoning, or banishing the relatives of the
royal house to protect the throne from possible plots;5. For not betraying the subject secretly, for a bribe, into the hands of
bands of professional Thugs, to be murdered and robbed in the prince's back lot.
Those were rather common princely industries in the old
times, but they and some
others of a harsh sort ceased long
ago under English rule. Better industries have taken
their
place, as this Address from the Jain community will show:
"Your Highness,—We the undersigned members of the Jain community
of Bombay
have the pleasure to approach your Highness with the expression
of our heartfelt
congratulations on the recent conference on your Highness
of the Knighthood of the Most
Exalted Order of the Star of India. Ten
years ago we had the pleasure and privilege of
welcoming your Highness to
this city under circumstances which have made a memorable
epoch in the
history of your State, for had it not been for a generous and reasonable
spirit
that your Highness displayed in the negotiations between the Palitana Durbar
and the Jain community, the conciliatory spirit that animated our people
could
not have borne fruit. That was the first step in your Highness's administration,
and it fitly elicited the praise of the Jain community, and of
the
Bombay Government. A decade of your Highness's administration, combined
with
the abilities, training, and acquirements that your Highness brought to
bear upon it,
has justly earned for your Highness the unique and honourable
distinction—the Knighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India,
which we understand your Highness is the first to enjoy among Chiefs of
your Highness's
rank and standing. And we assure your Highness that for
this mark of honour that has
been conferred on you by Her Most Gracious
Majesty, the Queen-Empress, we feel no less
proud than your Highness.
Establishment of commercial factories, schools, hospitals,
etc., by your Highness
in your State has marked your Highness's career during these ten years,
and we
trust that your Highness will be spared to rule over your people with
wisdom and
foresight, and foster the many reforms that your Highness has
been pleased to introduce
in your State. We again offer your Highness our
warmest felicitations for the honour
that has been conferred on you. We
beg to remain your Highness's obedient
servants."
Factories, schools, hospitals, reforms. The prince propagates
that kind of things in the modern times, and gets knighthood
and guns for it.
After the address the prince responded with snap and
brevity; spoke a moment with half
a dozen guests in English,
and with an official or two in a native tongue; then the
garlands were distributed as usual, and the function ended.
CHAPTER XLII.
Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last
breath.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
midnight, that night, there was another function.
This was a Hindoo wedding—no, I think it
was a betrothal ceremony. Always before, we had
driven through streets that were
multitudinous and tumultuous
with picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of
that.
We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was
hardly a suggestion
of life in those still and vacant streets.
Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on
the ground
lay sleeping natives—hundreds and hundreds. They lay
stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads
and all. Their attitude
and their rigidity counterfeited death.
The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is
devasting the
city now. The shops are deserted, now, half of the people
have fled,
and of the remainder the smitten perish by shoals
every day. No doubt the city looks now
in the daytime as it
looked then at night. When we had pierced deep into the native
quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we had
to go carefully, for men
were stretched asleep all about and
there was hardly room to drive between them. And
every
now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past the
horses' feet in
the vague light—the forbears of the rats that
are carrying the plague from
house to house in Bombay now.
The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the
street; and
the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were
sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present. Recurrent dead-watches,
it looked like.
MIDNIGHT IN A BOMBAY STREET.
But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light
ahead. It was the home
of the bride, wrapped in a perfect
conflagration of illuminations,—mainly
gas-work designs,
gotten up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of
brilliancy—flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors—it
was
another Aladdin show.
The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve
years, dressed as we would
dress a boy, though more expensively
than we should do it, of course. She moved about very
much at her ease, and
stopped and talked with the guests and
allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined. It
was very fine.
Particularly a rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look
at
and handle. It had a great emerald hanging to it.
The bridegroom was not present. He was having betrothal
festivities of his own at his
father's house. As I understood it,
he and the bride were to entertain company every
night and
nearly all night for a week or more, then get married, if alive.
Both of
the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms
go, in India—twelve;
they ought to have been married a year
A HIGH PRICED NAUTCH GIRL.
or two sooner; still to a stranger twelveseems quite young enough.
A while after midnight a couple of
celebrated and high-priced nautch-girls appeared
in the gorgeous place, and danced
and sang. With them were
men who played
upon strange
instruments which made uncanny
noises of a sort to make
one's flesh creep. One of these
instruments was a
pipe, and to
its music the girls went through
a performance which represented
snake-charming. It seemed
a doubtful sort of music to
charm anything with,
but a
native gentleman assured me
that snakes like it and will come out of their
holes and listen
to it with every evidence of refreshment and gratitude. He
said
that at an entertainment in his grounds once, the pipe
brought out half a dozen snakes,
and the music had to be stopped
before they would be persuaded to go. Nobody wanted
their
company, for they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but
no one would kill
them, of course, for it is sinful for a Hindoo
to kill any kind of a creature.
We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning.
Another picture,
then—but it has lodged itself in my memory
rather as a stage-scene than as a reality. It is of a porch and
short flight of steps
crowded with dark faces and ghostly-white
draperies flooded with the strong glare from
the dazzling concentration
of illuminations; and midway of the steps one conspicuous
figure for accent—a turbaned giant, with a name
according to his size:
Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale,
Vakeel to his Highness the Gaikwar of Baroda.
Without him
the picture would not have been complete; and if his name had
been
merely Smith, he wouldn't have answered. Close at hand
on
house-fronts on both sides of the narrow street were illuminations
of a kind commonly employed by the natives—scores
of glass tumblers
(containing tapers)
fastened a few inches
apart all over
great latticed
frames, forming
starry constellations
which showed
out vividly against
their black backgrounds.
As we
drew away into the distance down the dim lanes the illuminations
gathered together into a single mass, and glowed out of
the enveloping darkness
like a sun.
NAUTCH DANCING.
Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim
forms stretched everywhere on
the ground; and on either
hand those open booths counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit
corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit
death lamps. And now, a year later, when I read the
cablegrams I seem to be
reading of what I myself partly saw
—saw before it happened—in a
prophetic dream, as it were.
One cablegram says, "Business in the native town is about
suspended. Except the wailing and the tramp of the funerals.
There is but little life
or movement. The closed shops exceed
in number those that remain open." Another says
that 325,000
of the people have fled the city and are carrying the plague
to the country. Three
days later comes the news, "The population
is reduced by half." The refugees have carried the
disease
to Karachi; "220 cases, 214 deaths." A day or two
later, "52 fresh cases, all of which proved fatal."
The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease
can excite; for of all
diseases known to men it is the deadliest
—by far the deadliest. "Fifty-two
fresh cases—all fatal."
It is the Black Death alone
that slays like that. We can all
imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a
plague-stricken
city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant
bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there
and yonder, but I
suppose it is not possible for us to realize
to ourselves the nightmare of dread and
fear that possesses
the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away.
That half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests
to us something of
what they were feeling, but perhaps not
even they could realize what the half million
were feeling
whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror
without
chance of escape. Kinglake was in Cairo many years
ago during an epidemic of the Black
Death, and he has
imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a
time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign
in the armpit, and then
the delirium with confused images, and
home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and
then the sudden
blank of death:
"To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having
no faith
in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devil-may-care
indifference which might stand him instead of creeds—to such one,
every
rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of
sublimity. If
by any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth, he sees
death dangling from
every sleeve; and, as he creeps forward, he poises his
shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right
elbow and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him clean down as it
sweeps along on his left. But most of all he dreads that which most of all he
should love—the touch of a woman's dress; for mothers and wives, hurrying
forth on kindly errands from the bedsides of the dying, go slouching along
through the streets more willfully and less courteously than the men. For a
while it may be that the caution of the poor Levantine may enable him to
avoid contact, but sooner or later, perhaps, the dreaded chance arrives; that
bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labors along
with the voluptuous clumsiness of Grisi—she has touched the poor Levantine
with the hem of her sleeve! From that dread moment his peace is gone; his
mind for ever hanging upon the fatal touch invites the blow which he fears;
he watches for the symptoms of plague so carefully, that sooner or later they
come in truth. The parched mouth is a sign—his mouth is parched; the
throbbing brain—his brain does throb; the rapid pulse—he touches his own
wrist (for he dares not ask counsel of any man lest he be deserted), he touches
his wrist, and feels how his frighted blood goes galloping out of his heart.
There is nothing but the fatal swelling that is wanting to make his sad conviction
complete; immediately, he has an odd feel under the arm—no pain,
but a little straining of the skin; he would to God it were his fancy that were
strong enough to give him that sensation; this is the worst of all. It now
seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his parched mouth,
and his throbbing brain, and his rapid pulse, if only he could know that there
were no swelling under the left arm; but dares he try?—in a moment of
calmness and deliberation he dares not; but when for a while he has writhed
under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of will drives him to seek
and know his fate; he touches the gland, and finds the skin sane and sound
but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol-bullet, that moves as
he pushes it. Oh! but is this for all certainty, is this the sentence of death?
Feel the gland of the other arm. There is not the same lump exactly, yet
something a little like it. Have not some people glands naturally enlarged?
—would to heaven he were one! So he does for himself the work of the
plague, and when the Angel of Death thus courted does indeed and in truth
come, he has only to finish that which has been so well begun; he passes his
fiery hand over the brain of the victim, and lets him rave for a season, but all
chance-wise, of people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent.
Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and
sees the sun-dial that stood in his childhood's garden—sees his mother, and
the long-since-forgotten face of that little dear sister—(he sees her, he says,
on a Sunday morning, for all the church bells are ringing); he looks up and
down through the universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of
cotton, and cotton eternal—so much so—that he feels—he knows—he
swears he could make that winning hazard, if the billiard-table would not
slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it is not—
it's a cue that won't move—his own arm won't move—in short, there's the
devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine; and perhaps, the next night
but one he becomes the "life and the soul" of some squalling jackal family,
who fish him out by the foot from his shallow and sandy grave."
CHAPTER XLIII.
Hunger is the handmaid of genius. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
day during our stay in Bombay there was a criminal
trial of a most interesting sort, a terribly realistic
chapter out of the "Arabian
Nights," a strange mixture
of simplicities and pieties and murderous practicalities,
which brought back the
forgotten days of Thuggee and made
them live again; in fact, even made them believable.
It was
a case where a young girl had been assassinated for the sake
of her
trifling ornaments, things not worth a laborer's day's
wages in America. This thing
could have been done in many
other countries, but hardly with the cold business-like
depravity,
absence of fear, absence of caution,
destitution of the
sense of horror, repentance, remorse, exhibited in this case.
Elsewhere the murderer would have done his crime secretly,
by night, and without
witnesses; his fears would have allowed
him no peace while the dead body was in his
neighborhood;
he would not have rested until he had gotten it safe out of the
way
and hidden as effectually as he could hide it. But this
Indian murderer does his deed in
the full light of day, cares
nothing for the society of witnesses, is in no way incommoded
by the presence of the corpse, takes his own time about
disposing of it, and the
whole party are so indifferent, so
phlegmatic, that they take their regular sleep as if
nothing
was happening and no halters hanging over them; and these
five bland
people close the episode with a religious service.
The thing reads like a Meadows-Taylor
Thug-tale of half a
century ago, as may be seen by the official report of the trial:
"At the Mazagon Police Court yesterday, Superintendent Nolan again
charged Tookaram
Suntoo Savat Baya, woman, her daughter Krishni, and
Gopal Vithoo Bhanayker, before Mr.
Phiroze Hoshang Dastur, Fourth Presidency
Magistrate, under sections 302 and 109 of the Code, with having on the
night of
the 30th of December last murdered a Hindoo girl named Cassi, aged
12, by strangulation,
in the room of a chawl at Jakaria Bunder, on the Sewriroad,
and also with aiding and abetting each other in the commission of the
offense.
"Mr. F. A. Little, Public Prosecutor, conducted the case on behalf of the
Crown, the
accused being undefended.
"Mr. Little applied under the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code
to tender
pardon to one of the accused, Krishni, woman, aged 22, on her
undertaking to make a true
and full statement of facts under which the
deceased girl Cassi was murdered.
"The Magistrate having granted the Public Prosecutor's application, the
accused
Krishni went into the witness-box, and, on being examined by Mr.
Little, made the
following confession:—I am a mill-hand employed at the
Jubilee Mill. I
recollect the day (Tuesday on which the body of the deceased
Cassi was found.
Previous to that I attended the mill for half a day, and
then returned home at 3 in the
afternoon, when I saw five persons in the
house, viz.: the first accused Tookaram, who
is my paramour, my mother,
the second accused Baya, the accused Gopal, and two guests
named Ramji
Daji and Annaji Gungaram. Tookaram rented the room of the chawl situated
at Jakaria Bunder-road from its owner, Girdharilal Radhakishan, and in
that room
I, my paramour, Tookaram, and his younger brother, Yesso
Mahadhoo, live. Since his
arrival in Bombay from his native country Yesso
came and lived with us. When I returned
from the mill on the afternoon of
that day, I saw the two guests seated on a cot in the
veranda, and a few
minutes after the accused Gopal came and took his seat by their side,
while I
and my mother were seated inside the room. Tookaram, who had gone out
to
fetch some pan and betelnuts, on his return home had brought the two
guests with him. After returning home he gave them pan supari.
While
they were eating it my mother came out of the room and inquired of one
of
the guests, Ramji, what had happened to his foot, when he replied that he
had tried many
remedies, but they had done him no good. My mother then
took some rice in her hand and
prophesied that the disease which Ramji was
suffering from would not be cured until he
returned to his native country.
In the meantime the deceased Cassi came from the
direction of an out-house,
and stood in front on the threshhold of our room with a lota in her hand.
Tookaram then told his two guests to leave the
room, and they then went up
the steps towards the quarry. After the guests had gone
away, Tookaram
seized the deceased, who had come into the room, and he afterwards put a
waistband around her, and tied her to a post which supports a loft. After
doing
this, he pressed the girl's throat, and, having tied her mouth with the
dhotur (now shown in Court), fastened it to the post.
Having killed the girl,
Tookaram removed her gold head ornament and a gold putlee, and also took
charge of her lota.
Besides these two ornaments Cassi had on her person ear-
studs, a nose-ring, some silver toe-rings, two necklaces, a pair of silver anklets
and
bracelets. Tookaram afterwards tried to remove the silver amulets, the
ear-studs, and
the nose-ring; but he failed in his attempt. While he was
doing so, I, my mother, and
Gopal were present. After removing the two
gold ornaments, he handed them over to Gopal,
who was at the time standing
near me. When he killed Cassi, Tookaram threatened to
strangle me also if
I informed any one of this. Gopal and myself were then standing at
the
door of our room, and we both were threatened by Tookaram. My mother,
Baya,
had seized the legs of the deceased at the time she was killed, and
whilst she was being
tied to the post. Cassi then made a noise. Tookaram
and my mother took part in killing
the girl. After the murder her body was
wrapped up in a mattress and kept on the loft
over the door of our room.
When Cassi was strangled, the door of the room was fastened
from the inside
by Tookaram. This deed was committed shortly after my return home from
work in the mill. Tookaram put the body of the deceased in the mattress,
and,
after it was left on the loft, he went to have his head shaved by a barber
named Sambhoo
Raghoo, who lives only one door away from me. My mother
and myself then remained in the
possession of the information. I was slapped
and threatened by my paramour, Tookaram,
and that was the only reason
why I did not inform any one at that time. When I told
Tookaram that I
would give information of the occurrence, he slapped me. The accused
Gopal
was asked by Tookaram to go back to his room, and he did so, taking away
with him the two gold ornaments and the lota. Yesso Mahadhoo, a brother-in-law
of Tookaram, came to the house and asked Tookaram why he was
washing, the
water-pipe being just opposite. Tookaram replied that he was
washing his dhotur, as a fowl had polluted it. About 6 o'clock of the evening
of
that day my mother gave me three pice and asked me to buy a cocoanut,
and I gave the
money to Yessoo, who went and fetched a cocoanut and some
betel leaves. When Yessoo and
others were in the room I was bathing, and,
after I finished my bath, my mother took the
cocoanut and the betel leaves
from Yessoo, and we five went to the sea. The party
consisted of Tookaram,
my mother, Yessoo, Tookaram's younger brother, and myself. On
reaching
the seashore, my mother made the offering to the sea, and prayed to be pardoned
for what we had done. Before we went to the sea, some one came to
inquire after
the girl Cassi. The police and other people came to make these
inquiries both before and
after we left the house for the seashore. The police
questioned my mother about the
girl, and she replied that Cassi had come to
her door, but had left. The next day the
police questioned Tookaram, and
he, too, gave a similar reply. This was said the same
night when the search
was made for the girl. After the offering was made to the sea, we
partook of
the cocoanut and returned home, when my mother gave me some food; but
Tookaram did not partake of any food that night. After dinner I and my
mother slept
inside the room, and Tookaram slept on a cot near his brother-in-law,
Yessoo Mahadhoo, just outside the door. That was not the usual
place where Tookaram slept. He usually slept inside the room. The body
of the
deceased remained on the loft when I went to sleep. The room in
which we slept was
locked, and I heard that my paramour, Tookaram, was
restless outside. About 3 o'clock the following morning Tookaram knocked
at the door,
when both myself and my mother opened it. He then told me to
go to the steps leading to
the quarry, and see if any one was about. Those
steps lead to a stable, through which we
go to the quarry at the back of the compound.
When I got to
the steps I saw no one there. Tookaram asked me if
any one was there, and I replied that
I could see no one about. He then took
the body of the deceased from the loft, and
having wrapped it up in his saree,
asked me to accompany him to the steps of the quarry, and I did so. The
saree now produced here was the same. Besides the saree, there was also a
cholee on the body. He then carried the body in his arms, and went up
the
steps, through the stable, and then to the right hand towards a sahib's
bungalow,
where Tookaram placed the body near a wall. All
the time I and my
mother were with him. When the body was taken down, Yessoo was lying
on the cot. After depositing the body under the wall, we all returned home,
and
soon after 5 a. m. the police again came and took Tookaram away.
About an hour after
they returned and took me and my mother away. We
were questioned about it, when I made a
statement. Two hours later I
was taken to the room, and I pointed out this waistband,
the dhotur, the mattress,
and the
wooden post to Superintendent Nolan and Inspectors Roberts
and Rashanali, in the
presence of my mother and Tookaram. Tookaram
killed the girl Cassi for her ornaments,
which he wanted for the girl to whom
he was shortly going to be married. The body was
found in the same place
where it was deposited by Tookaram."
The criminal side of the native has always been picturesque,
always readable. The
Thuggee and one or two other particularly
outrageous features of it have been suppressed by the
English, but there is enough
of it left to keep it darkly interesting.
One finds
evidence of these survivals in the newspapers.
Macaulay
has a light-throwing passage upon this
matter in his great historical sketch of Warren
Hastings,
where he is describing some effects which followed the temporary
paralysis of Hastings' powerful government brought
about by Sir Philip Francis and
his party:
"The natives considered Hastings as a fallen man; and they acted after
their kind.
Some of our readers may have seen, in India, a cloud of crows
pecking a sick vulture to
death—no bad type of what happens in that country
as often as fortune deserts
one who has been great and dreaded. In an instant
all the sycophants, who had lately
been ready to lie for him, to forge for him,
to pander for him, to poison for him,
hasten to purchase the favor of his
victorious enemies by accusing him. An Indian
government has only to let
it be understood that it wishes a particular man to be
ruined, and in twenty-four
hours it will be furnished with grave charges, supported by depositions
so full
and circumstantial that any person unaccustomed to Asiatic mendacity
would regard them as decisive. It is well if the signature of the destined
victim is
not counterfeited at the foot of some illegal compact, and if some
treasonable paper is
not slipped into a hiding-place in his house."
That was nearly a century and a quarter ago. An article
in one of the chief journals
of India (the Pioneer) shows that
in some
respects the native of to-day is just what his ancestor
was then. Here are niceties of
so subtle and delicate a sort
that they lift their breed of rascality to a place among
the fine
arts, and almost entitle it to respect:
"The records of the Indian courts might certainly be relied upon to prove
that
swindlers as a class in the East come very close to, if they do not surpass,
in
brilliancy of execution and originality of design the most expert of their
fraternity in
Europe and America. India in especial is the home of forgery.
There are some particular
districts which are noted as marts for the finest
specimens of the forger's handiwork.
The business is carried on by firms
who possess stores of stamped
papers to suit every emergency. They habitually
lay in a store of fresh stamped
papers every year, and some of the older and
more thriving houses can supply documents
for the past forty years, bearing
the proper water-mark and
possessing the genuine appearance of age. Other districts
have earned notoriety for skilled perjury, a pre-eminence that excites a
respectful admiration when one thinks of the universal prevalence of the
art,
and persons desirous of succeeding in false suits are ready to pay handsomely
to
avail themselves of the services of these local experts as witnesses."
Various instances illustrative of the methods of these
swindlers are given. They
exhibit deep cunning and total
depravity on the part of the swindler and his pals, and
more
obtuseness on the part of the victim than one would expect to
find in a
country where suspicion of your neighbor must surely
be one of the earliest things
learned. The favorite subject is the ,
young fool who has just come into a fortune and
is trying to
see how poor a use he can put it to. I will quote one example:
"Sometimes another form of confidence trick is adopted, which is invariably
successful. The particular pigeon is spotted, and, his acquaintance
having been
made, he is encouraged in every form of vice. When the friendship
is thoroughly established, the swindler remarks to the young man that
he has a
brother who has asked him to lend him Rs.10,000. The swindler
says he has the money and
would lend it; but, as the borrower is his brother,
he cannot charge interest. So he
proposes that he should hand the dupe the
money, and the latter should lend it to the
swindler's brother, exacting a
heavy pre-payment of interest which, it is pointed out,
they may equally
enjoy in dissipation. The dupe sees no objection, and on the appointed day
receives
Rs.7,000 from the swindler, which he hands over to the confederate.
The latter is
profuse in his thanks, and executes a promissory note for
Rs.10,000, payable to bearer.
The swindler allows the scheme to remain
quiescent for a time, and then suggests that,
as the money has not been
repaid and as it would be unpleasant to sue his brother, it
would be better to
sell the note in the bazaar. The dupe hands the note over, for the
money he
advanced was not his, and, on being informed that it would be necessary to
have his signature on the back so as to render the security negotiable, he
signs
without any hesitation. The swindler passes it on to confederates, and
the latter employ
a respectable firm of solicitors to ask the dupe if his signature
is genuine. He admits it at once, and his fate is sealed. A suit is filed
by a
confederate against the dupe, two accomplices being made co-defendants.
They admit their signatures as indorsers, and the one swears he
bought
the note for value from the dupe The latter has no defense, for no court
would believe the apparently idle explanation of the manner in which he
came to endorse
the note."
There is only one India! It is the only country that has
a monopoly of grand and
imposing specialties. When another
country has a remarkable thing, it cannot have it all
to itself
—some other country has a duplicate. But India—that is
different. Its marvels are its own; the patents cannot be infringed;
imitations are not possible. And think of the size of
them, the
majesty of them, the weird and outlandish character
of the most of them!
There is the Plague, the Black Death: India invented it;
India is the cradle of that
mighty birth.
The Car of Juggernaut was India's invention.
So was the Suttee; and within the time of men still living
eight hundred widows
willingly, and, in fact, rejoicingly,
burned themselves to death on the bodies of their
dead husbands
in a single year. Eight hundred would do it this year
if the British government
would let them.
Famine is India's specialty. Elsewhere famines are inconsequential
incidents—in India they are devastating cataclysms;
in one case they
annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions.
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion
all other countries are
paupers; India is the only millionaire.
With her everything is on a giant scale—even her poverty;
no other country
can show anything to compare with it. And
she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale
that she has to
shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums.
She
describes 100,000 with one word—a lakh; she describes
ten millions with one word—a crore.
In the bowels of the granite mountains she has patiently
carved out dozens of vast
temples, and made them glorious
with sculptured colonnades and stately groups of
statuary, and
has adorned the eternal walls with noble paintings. She has
built
fortresses of such magnitude that the show-strongholds
of the rest of the world are but
modest little things by comparison;
palaces that are
wonders for rarity of materials, delicacy
and beauty of workmanship, and for cost; and one tomb
which men go around the
globe to see. It takes eighty nations,
speaking eighty languages, to people her, and
they number
three hundred millions.
On top of all this she is the mother and home of that wonder
of wonders—caste—and of that mystery of
mysteries,
the satanic brotherhood of the Thugs.
India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of
things. She had the first
civilization; she had the first accumulation
of material wealth; she was populous with deep
thinkers and subtle intellects; she
had mines, and woods, and
a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the
lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien
master, but mistress
of the world, and delivering law and command
to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was
never any possibility of
such supremacy for her. If there had
been but one India and one language—but
there were eighty
of them! Where there are eighty nations and several hundred
governments, fighting and quarreling must be the common
business of life; unity of
purpose and policy are impossible;
out of such elements supremacy in the world cannot come.
Even caste itself could have had the defeating effect of a
multiplicity of tongues, no doubt; for it separates a people
into layers, and layers, and still other layers, that have no
community of feeling with each other; and in such a condition
of things as that, patriotism can have no healthy
growth.
It was the division of the country into so many States and
nations that made Thuggee
possible and prosperous. It is
difficult to realize the situation. But perhaps one may
approximate
it by imagining the States of our Union peopled by separate
nations, speaking separate languages, with guards and
custom-houses strung along
all frontiers, plenty of interruptions
for travelers and traders, interpreters able to handle all
the languages very rare
or non-existent, and a few wars always
going on here and there and yonder as a further
embarrassment
to commerce and excursioning. It would make intercommunication
in a measure ungeneral. India had eighty
languages, and more custom-houses than
cats. No clever man
with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what
a chance for business was here offered. India was full of clever
men with the
highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally,
the brotherhood of the Thugs came into
being to meet the
long-felt want.
How long ago that was nobody knows—centuries, it is
supposed. One of the
chiefest wonders connected with it was
the success with which it kept its secret. The
English trader
did business in India two hundred years and more before he
ever
heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its thousands all
around him every year, the
whole time.
CHAPTER XLIV.
The old saw says, "Let a sleeping dog lie." Right. Still, when there is much
at stake
it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
28. I learned of an official
Thug-book the
other day. I was not aware before that there was such
a thing. I am
allowed the temporary use of it. We
are making preparations for travel. Mainly the
preparations
are purchases of bedding. This is to be used in sleeping berths
in
the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths
of the hotels. It is not
realizable; and yet it is true. It is a
survival; an apparently unnecessary thing which
in some
strange way has outlived the conditions which once made it
necessary. It
comes down from a time when the railway and
the hotel did not exist; when the occasional
white traveler
went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the
small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government—a
shelter, merely, and nothing more. He had to carry
bedding along, or do without.
The dwellings of the English
residents are spacious and comfortable and commodiously
furnished,
and surely it must be an odd sight to see half
a dozen
guests come filing into such a place and dumping blankets and
pillows here
and there and everywhere. But custom makes incongruous
things congruous.
One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost
any shop—there is no difficulty about it.
January 30. What a spectacle the railway station was, at
train-time! It was a very large station, yet when we arrived
A RAILWAY STATION.
it seemed as if the whole world was present—half of it inside,
the other
half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous
head-loads of bedding and other
freight, trying simultaneously
to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one narrow
door.
These opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering natives,
with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and
wherever
a white man's native servant appeared, that native
seemed to have
put aside his natural gentleness for the time
and invested himself with the white man's
privilege of making
a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black
things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority Satan was
scandalous. He was
probably a Thug in one of his former incarnations.
Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed
natives swept along, this way and that, in massed and
bewildering confusion,
eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and
washed up to the long trains and flowed into
them with their
packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed at once by the
next
wash, the next wave. And here and there, in the midst
of this hurly-burly, and seemingly
undisturbed by it, sat great
groups of natives on the bare stone
floor,—young, slender
brown women, old, gray wrinkled women, little soft
brown
babies, old men, young men, boys; all poor people, but all the
females among
them, both big and little, bejeweled with cheap
and showy nose-rings, toe-rings,
leglets, and armlets, these
things constituting all their wealth, no doubt. These silent
crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and
small household gear
about them, and patiently waited—for
what? A train that was to start at some
time or other during
the day or night! They hadn't timed themselves well, but
that
was no matter—the thing had been so ordered from on
high, therefore why
worry? there was plenty of time, hours
and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen—there
was no hurrying it.
The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap
rates. They were packed and
crammed into cars that held
each about fifty; and it was said that often a Brahmin of
the
highest caste was thus brought into personal touch, and consequent
defilement, with persons of the lowest castes—no doubt
a very shocking
thing if a body could understand it and prop
erly appreciate it. Yes, a Brahmin who
didn't own a rupee
and couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a
rich
hereditary lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient
title a couple of yards long,
and he would just have to stand
it; for if either of the two was allowed to go in the
cars
where the sacred white people were, it probably wouldn't be
the august poor
Brahmin. There was an immense string of
those third-class cars, for the natives travel
by hordes; and a
weary hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt.
When we reached our car, Satan and Barney had already
arrived there with their train
of porters carrying bedding and
parasols and cigar boxes, and were at work. We named him
Barney for short; we couldn't use his real name, there wasn't
time.
It was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury. Yet
the cost of
it—well, economy could no further go; even in
France; not even in Italy. It
was built of the plainest and
cheapest partially-smoothed boards, with a coating of dull
paint on them, and there was nowhere a thought of decoration.
The floor was bare,
but would not long remain so when the
dust should begin to fly. Across one end of the
compartment
ran a netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the
other end
was a door which would shut, upon compulsion, but
wouldn't stay shut; it opened into a
narrow little closet which
had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a place to put a towel,
in case you had one with you—and you would be sure to
have towels, because
you buy them with the bedding, knowing
that the railway doesn't furnish them. On each
side of the
car, and running fore and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa
—to sit on in the day and sleep on at night. Over each sofa
hung, by straps,
a wide, flat, leather-covered shelf—to sleep
on. In the daytime you can hitch
it up against the wall, out
of the way—and then you have a big unencumbered
and most
comfortable room to spread out in. No car in any country is
quite its
equal for comfort (and privacy) I think. For usually
there are but two
persons in it; and even when there are four
there is but little sense of impaired
privacy. Our own cars at
home can surpass the railway world in all details but that one:
they have no cosiness; there are too many people together.
At the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and
exit.
Along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car
ran a row of large
single-plate windows, of a blue tint—blue
to soften the bitter glare of the
sun and protect one's eyes
from torture. These could be let down out of the way when
one wanted the breeze. In the roof were two oil lamps which
gave a light strong
enough to read by; each had a green-cloth
attachment by which it could be covered when
the light
should be no longer needed.
While we talked outside with friends, Barney and Satan
placed the hand-baggage, books,
fruits, and soda-bottles in the
racks, and the hold-alls and heavy baggage in the
closet, hung
the overcoats and sun-helmets and towels on the hooks, hoisted
the
two bed-shelves up out of the way, then shouldered their
bedding and retired to the
third class.
Now then, you see what a handsome, spacious, light, airy,
homelike place it was,
wherein to walk up and down, or sit
and write, or stretch out and read and smoke. A
central
door in the forward end of the compartment opened into a
similar compartment. It was
occupied by my wife and
daughter. About nine in the evening, while we halted a
while at a station, Barney and Satan came and undid the
clumsy big hold-alls, and spread
the bedding on the sofas in
both compartments—mattresses, sheets, gay
coverlets, pillows,
all complete; there are no chambermaids in India—apparently
it was an office that was never heard of. Then they
closed the communicating door,
nimbly tidied up our place,
put the night-clothing on the beds and the slippers under
them, then returned to their own quarters.
January 31. It was novel and pleasant, and I stayed
awake as
long as I could, to enjoy it, and to read about those
strange people the Thugs. In my
sleep they remained with
me, and tried to strangle me. The leader of the gang was
that giant Hindoo who was such a picture in the strong light
when we were leaving those
Hindoo betrothal festivities at
two o'clock in the morning—Rao Bahadur
Baskirao Balinkanje
Pitale, Vakeel to the Gaikwar of Baroda. It was he
that brought me the invitation
from his master to go to
Baroda and lecture to that prince—and now he was
misbehaving
in my dreams. But all things can happen in dreams.
It is indeed as the Sweet
Singer of Michigan says—irrelevantly,
of course, for the one and unfailing great quality
which distinguishes her poetry from Shakespeare's and makes
it precious to us is
its stern and simple irrelevancy:
My heart was gay and happy,This was ever in my mind,There is better times a coming,And I hope some day to findMyself capable of composing,It was my heart's delightTo compose on a sentimental subjectIf it came in my mind just right.*
"The Sentimental Song Book," p. 49; theme, "The Author's Early Life," 19th stanza.
Baroda. Arrived at 7 this morning. The dawn was just
beginning
to show. It was forlorn to have to turn out in a
strange place at such a time, and the
blinking lights in the
station made it seem night still. But the gentlemen who had
come to receive us were there with their servants, and they
make quick work; there was
no lost time. We were soon outside
and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and
presently were comfortably
housed—with more servants to
help than we were used to, and with rather
embarassingly important
officials to direct them. But it was custom; they
spoke Ballarat English, their
bearing was charming and hospitable,
and so all went
well.
Breakfast was a satisfaction. Across the lawns was visible
in the distance through the
open window an Indian well, with
two oxen tramping leisurely up and down long inclines,
drawing
water; and out of the stillness came the suffering screech
of the
machinery—not quite musical, and yet soothingly
melancholy and dreamy and
reposeful—a wail of lost spirits,
one might imagine. And commemorative and
reminiscent,
perhaps; for of course the Thugs used to throw people down
that well
when they were done with them.
After breakfast the day began, a sufficiently busy one.
We were driven by winding
roads through a vast park, with
noble forests of great trees, and with tangles and
jungles of
lovely growths of a humbler sort; and at one place three large
gray
apes came out and pranced across the road—a good deal
of a surprise and an
unpleasant one, for such creatures belong
in the menagerie, and they look artificial and
out of place in
a wilderness.
We came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it.
Intensely Indian, it was,
and crumbly, and mouldering, and
immemorially old, to all appearance. And the
houses—oh,
indescribably quaint and curious they were, with their fronts
an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful wood-carving,
and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of
elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and
all the ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes
occupied as shops—shops unbelievably small and impossibly
packed with merchantable rubbish, and with nine-tenths-naked
natives squatting at their work of hammering, pounding, brazing,
soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out
grain, grinding it, repairing idols—and then the swarm of
ragged and noisy humanity under the horses' feet and everywhere,
and the pervading reek and fume and smell! It was
all wonderful and delightful.
Imagine a file of elephants marching through such a crevice
of a street and scraping
the paint off both sides of it with their
hides. How big they must look, and how little
they must
make the houses look; and when the elephants are in their
glittering
court costume, what a contrast they must make with
the humble and sordid surroundings.
And when a mad
elephant goes raging through, belting right and left with his
trunk, how do these swarms of people get out of the way?
I suppose it is a thing which
happens now and then in the mad
season (for elephants have a mad
season).
I wonder how old the town is. There are patches of building—massive
structures, monuments, apparently—that are so
battered and worn, and
seemingly so tired and so burdened
with the weight of age, and so dulled and stupefied
with trying
to remember things they forgot before history began, that
they give one the
feeling that they must have been a part of
original Creation. This is indeed one of the
oldest of the
princedoms of India, and has always been celebrated for its
barbaric
pomps and splendors, and for the wealth of its
princes.
A MAD SEASON.
CHAPTER XLV.
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the
heart; the
one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
ROADSIDE VIEWS.
of the town again; a long drive through open country,
by winding roads among secluded villages nestling
in the inviting shade of tropic vegetation, a Sabbath
stillness every where, sometimes
a pervading sense of solitude, but
always
barefoot natives gliding by
like spirits, without
sound of footfall, and
others in the distance
dissolving away and
vanishing like the
creatures of
dreams.
Now and then a
string of stately
camels passed by—
always interesting things to look
at—and they were velvet-shod by
nature, and made no noise. Indeed,
there were no noises of any sort in
this
paradise. Yes, once there was one, for a moment: a file of
native convicts passed along
in charge of an officer, and we
caught the soft clink of their chains. In a retired spot, resting
himself under a tree, was a holy person—a naked black
fakeer, thin and skinny, and whitey-gray all over with ashes.
By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but
i was by
request—I did not ask for it, and didn't want it;
but I took it, because
otherwise they would have thought I
was afraid, which I was. The elephant kneels down,
by command—"
one end of him at a time — and you climb the ladder
and get into the
howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a
time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and
after that, as he
strides monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship's
motion. The mahout bores into the back of his head with a
great irn prod and you wonder
at his temerity and at the
elephant's patience, and you think that perhaps the patience
will not last; but it does, and nothing happens. The mahout
talks to the elephant
in a low voice all the time, and the elephant
seems to understand it all and to be pleased with it; and
he obeys every order in
the most conrented and docile way.
Among these twenty-five elephants were two which were
larger than any I had ever seen before, and if I had thought I
could learn to not
be afraid, I would have taken one of them
while the police were not looking.
In the howdah-house there were many howdahs that were
made of silver, one of gold, and
of old ivory, and equipped
with cushions and canoies of rich and costly stuffs. The
wardrobe of the elephants was there, too; vast velvet covers
stiff and heavy with
gold embroidery; and bells of silver and
gold; and ropes of these metals for fastening
the things on—
harness, so to speak; and monster hoops of massive gold for
the elephant to wear on his ankles when he is out in procession
on business of
state.
But we did not see the treasury of crown jewels, and that
was a disappointment, for in
mass and richness it ranks only
second in India. By mistake we we taken to see the new palace
instead, and we used up the last remnant of our spare time
there. It was a pity, too; for the new palace is mixed modern
American-European, and has not a merit except costliness. It
is wholly foreign to India, and impudent and out of place.
The architect has escaped. This comes of overdoing the suppression
of the Thugs; they had their merits. The old palace
is oriental and charming, and in consonance with the country.
The old palace would still be great if there were nothing of it
but the spacious and lofty hall where the durbars are held. It
is not a good place to lecture in, on account of the echoes, but
it is a good place to hold durbars in and regulate the affairs of
a kingdom, and that is what it is for. If I had it I would have
a durbar every day, instead of once or twice a year.
The prince is an educated gentleman. His culture is European.
He has been in Europe five times. People say that
this is costly amusement for
him, since in crossing the sea he
must sometimes be obliged to drink water from vessels
that
are more or less public, and thus damage his caste. To get it
purified again
he must make pilgrimage to some renowned
Hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two
to them. His
people are like the other Hindoos, profoundly religious; and
they
could not be content with a master who was impure.
We failed to see the jewels, but we saw the gold cannon and
the silver
one—they seemed to be six-pounders. They were
not designed for business, but
for salutes upon rare and particularly
important state occasions. An ancestor of the present
Gaikwar had the silver one
made, and a subsequent ancestor
had the gold one made, in order to outdo him.
This sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of
Baroda, which was of old
famous for style and show. It used
to entertain visiting rajahs and viceroys with
tiger-fights, ele-
phant-fights, illuminations, and elephant-processions of the
most glittering and
gorgeous character.
It makes the circus a pale, poor thing.
A PRIZE WINNER.
In the train, during a part of the return journey from
Baroda, we had the company of a
gentleman who had with
him a remarkable looking dog. I had not seen one of its kind
before, as far as I could remember; though of course I might
have seen one and not
noticed it, for I am not acquainted with
dogs, but only with cats. This dog's coat was
smooth and
shiny and black, and I think it had tan trimmings around the
edges of
the dog, and perhaps underneath. It
was a long, low dog, with very short, strange
legs—legs that
curved inboard,
something like
parentheses
turned the
wrong way (.
Indeed, it was
made on the plan of a bench
for length and lowness. It
seemed to be satisfied, but I thought the plan poor, and structurally
weak, on account of the distance between the forward
supports and those abaft.
With age the dog's back was likely
to sag; and it seemed to me that it would have been a
stronger
and more practicable dog if it had had some more legs. It
had not begun
to sag yet, but the shape of the legs showed
that the undue weight imposed upon them was
beginning to
tell. It had a long nose, and floppy ears that hung down, and
a
resigned expression of countenance. I did not like to ask
what kind of a dog it was, or
how it came to be deformed, for
it was plain that the gentleman was very fond of it, and
naturally
he could be sensitive about it. From delicacy I thought
it best not to seem to
notice it too much. No doubt a man
with a dog like that feels just as a person does who has a child
that is out of true.
The gentleman was not merely fond of
the dog, he was also proud of it—just
the same again, as a
mother feels about her child when it is an idiot. I could see that
he was proud of it, notwithstanding it was such a long dog and
looked so resigned
and pious. It had been all over the world
with him, and had been pilgriming like that
for years and
years. It had traveled 50,000 miles by sea and rail, and had
ridden
in front of him on his horse 8,000. It had a silver
medal from the Geographical Society
of Great Britain for its
travels, and I saw it. It had won prizes in dog shows, both in
India and in England—I saw them. He said its pedigree was
on record in
the Kennel Club, and that it was a well-known
dog. He said a great many people in London
could recognize
it the moment they saw it. I did not say anything, but I did
not
think it anything strange; I should know that dog again,
myself, yet I am not careful
about noticing dogs. He said
that when he walked along in London, people often stopped
and looked at the dog. Of course I did not say anything, for
I did not want to
hurt his feelings, but I could have explained
to him that if you take a great long low
dog like that and
waddle it along the street anywhere in the world and not
charge
anything, people will stop and look. He was gratified
because the dog took prizes. But
that was nothing; if I were
built like that I could take prizes myself. I wished I knew
what kind of a dog it was, and what it was for, but I could not
very well ask, for
that would show that I did not know. Not
that I want a dog like that, but only to know
the secret of its
birth.
I think he was going to hunt elephants with it, because I
know, from remarks dropped
by him, that he has hunted large
game in India and Africa, and likes it. But I think
that if he
tries to hunt elephants with it, he is going to be disappointed.
I do not believe that it is suited for elephants. It lacks energy,
it lacks force of
character, it lacks bitterness. These things all
show in the meekness and resignation of
its expression. It
would not attack an elephant, I am sure of it. It might not
run
if it saw one coming, but it looked to me like a dog that
would sit down and pray.
I wish he had told me what breed it was, if there are
others; but I shall know the dog
next time, and then if I can
bring myself to it I will put delicacy aside and ask. If I
seem
strangely interested in dogs, I have a reason for it; for a dog
saved me from
an embarrassing position once, and that has
made me grateful to these animals; and if by
study I could
learn to tell some of the kinds from the others, I should be
greatly
pleased. I only know one kind apart, yet, and that is
the kind that saved me that time.
I always know that kind
when I meet it, and if it is hungry or lost I take care of it.
The matter happened in this way:
It was years and years ago. I had received a note from
Mr. Augustin Daly of the Fifth
Avenue Theatre, asking me to
call the next time I should be in New York. I was writing
plays, in those days, and he was admiring them and trying to
get me a chance to
get them played in Siberia. I took the first
train—the early
one—the one that leaves Hartford at 8.29 in
the morning. At New Haven I
bought a paper, and found it
filled with glaring display-lines about a "bench-show"
there.
I had often heard of bench-shows, but had never felt any interest
in them, because I supposed they were lectures that were
not well attended. It
turned out, now, that it was not that,
but a dog-show. There was a double-leaded column
about the
king-feature of this one, which was called a Saint Bernard, and
was
worth $10,000, and was known to be the largest and finest
of his species in the world. I
read all this with interest,
because out of my school-boy readings I dimly remembered
how the priests and pilgrims of St. Bernard used to go out in
the storms and dig these
dogs out of the snowdrifts when lost
and exhausted, and give them brandy and save their
lives, and
drag them to the monastery and restore them with gruel.
Also, there was a picture of this prize-dog in the paper, a
noble great creature with
a benignant countenance, standing by
a table. He was placed in that way so that one
could get
a right idea of his great dimensions. You could see that he
was just a
shade higher than the table—indeed, a huge fellow
for a dog. Then there was a
description which went into the
details. It gave his enormous
weight—150½ pounds, and his
length—4 feet 2 inches,
from stem to stern-post; and his
height—3 feet 1 inch, to the top of his
back. The pictures
and the figures so impressed me, that I could see the beautiful
colossus before me, and I kept on thinking about him for the
next two hours; then I
reached New York, and he dropped
out of my mind.
In the swirl and tumult of the hotel lobby I ran across Mr.
Daly's comedian, the late
James Lewis, of beloved memory,
and I casually mentioned that I was going to call upon
Mr.
Daly in the evening at 8. He looked surprised, and said he
reckoned not. For
answer I handed him Mr. Daly's note.
Its substance was: "Come to my private den, over
the theater,
where we cannot be interrupted. And come by the back way,
not the
front. No. 642 Sixth Avenue is a cigar shop; pass
through it and you are in a paved
court, with high buildings
all around; enter the second door on the left, and come up
stairs."
"Is this all?"
"Yes," I said.
"Well, you'll never get in."
"Why?"
"Because you won't. Or if you do you can draw on me
(Owen Gormlay.)
"WELL, SOR, WHAT WILL YOU HAVE?"
for a hundred dollars; for you will be the first man that has
accomplished it in
twenty-five years. I can't think what Mr.
Daly can have been absorbed in. He has
forgotten a most
important detail, and he will feel humiliated in the morning
when
he finds that you tried to get in and couldn't."
"Why, what is the trouble?"
"I'll tell you. You see—"
At that point we were swept apart by the crowd, somebody
detained me with a moment's
talk, and we did not get together
again. But it did not matter; I believed he was
joking, anyway.
At eight in the evening I passed through the cigar shop and
into the court and knocked
at the second door.
"Come in!"
I entered. It was a small room, carpetless, dusty, with a
naked deal table, and two
cheap wooden chairs for furniture.
A giant Irishman was standing there, with shirt
collar and vest
unbuttoned, and no coat on. I put my hat on the table, and
was
about to say something, when the Irishman took the
innings himself. And not with marked
courtesy of tone:
"Well, sor, what will you have?"
I was a little disconcerted, and my easy confidence suffered
a shrinkage. The man
stood as motionless as Gibraltar, and
kept his unblinking eye upon me. It was very
embarrassing,
very humiliating. I stammered at a false start or two; then—
"I have just run down from—"
"Av ye plaze, ye'll not smoke here, ye understand."
I laid my cigar on the window-ledge; chased my flighty
thoughts a moment, then said in
a placating manner:—
"I—I have come to see Mr. Daly."
"Oh, ye have, have ye?"
"Yes."
"Well, ye'll not see him."
"But he asked me to come."
"Oh, he did, did he?"
"Yes, he sent me this note, and—"
"Lemme see it."
"HE HAD IT UPSIDE DOWN."
For a moment I fancied there would be a change in the
atmosphere, now; but this idea
was premature. The big man
was examining the note
searchingly under the gas-jet.
A glance showed me
that he had it upside down
—disheartening evidence
that he could not read.
"Is ut his own handwrite?"
"Yes—he wrote it himself."
"He did, did he?"
"Yes."
"H'm. Well, then, why
ud he write it like that?"
"How do you mean?"
"I mane, why wudn't he put his name to ut?"
"His name is to it. That's not
it—you are looking at my
name."
I thought that that was a home shot, but he did not betray
that he had been hit. He
said:
"It's not an aisy one to spell; how do you pronounce ut?"
"Mark Twain."
"H'm. H'm. Mike Train. H'm. I don't remember ut.
What is it ye want to see him about?"
"It isn't I that want to see him, he wants to see me."
"Oh, he does, does he?"
"Yes."
"What does he want to see ye about?"
"I don't know."
"Ye don't know! And ye confess it, becod! Well, I can
tell ye
wan thing—ye'll not see him. Are ye in the business?"
"What business?"
"The show business."
A fatal question. I recognized that I was defeated. If I
answered no, he would cut the
matter short and wave me to
the door without the grace of a word—I saw it in
his uncompromising
eye; if I said I was a lecturer, he would despise me,
and dismiss me with
opprobrious words; if I said I was a
dramatist, he would throw me out of the window. I
saw that
my case was hopeless, so I chose the course which seemed
least
humiliating: I would pocket my shame and glide out
without answering. The silence was
growing lengthy.
"I'll ask ye again. Are ye in the show business yerself?"
"Yes!"
I said it with splendid confidence; for in that moment the
very twin of that grand New
Haven dog loafed into the room,
and I saw that Irishman's eye light eloquently with
pride and
affection.
"Ye are? And what is it?"
"I've got a bench-show in New Haven."
The weather did change then.
"You don't say, sir! And that's your show,
sir! Oh, it's
a grand show, it's a wonderful show, sir, and a proud man I
am to
see your honor this day. And ye'll be an expert, sir,
and ye'll know all about
dogs—more than ever they know
theirselves, I'll take me oath to ut."
I said, with modesty—
"I believe I have some reputation that way. In fact, my
business requires it."
"Ye have some reputation, your honor! Bedad I believe
you!
There's not a jintleman in the worrld that can lay over
ye in the judgmint of a dog,
sir. Now I'll vinture that your
honor'll know that dog's dimensions there better than he
knows
them his own self, and just by the casting of your educated eye
upon him.
Would you mind giving a guess, if ye'll be so good?"
I knew that upon my answer would depend my fate. If I
made this dog bigger than the
prize-dog, it would be bad
diplomacy, and suspicious; if I fell too far short of the
prize-dog,
that would be equally damaging. The dog was
standing
by the table, and I believed I knew the difference between him
and the
one whose picture I had seen in the newspaper to a
shade. I spoke promptly up and
said—
"It's no trouble to guess this noble creature's figures:
height, three feet; length,
four feet and three-quarters of an
inch; weight, a hundred and forty-eight and a
quarter."
The man snatched his hat from its peg and danced on it
with joy, shouting:—
"Ye've hardly missed it the hair's breadth, hardly the shade
of a shade, your honor!
Oh, it's the miraculous eye ye've got,
for the judgmint of a dog!"
And still pouring out his admiration of my capacities, he
snatched off his vest and
scoured off one of the wooden chairs
with it, and scrubbed it and polished it, and
said—
"There, sit down, your honor, I'm ashamed of meself that I
forgot ye were standing all
this time; and do put on your hat,
ye mustn't take cold, it's a drafty place; and here
is your
cigar, sir, a getting cold, I'll give ye a light. There. The
place is all
yours, sir, and if ye'll just put your feet on the
table and make yourself at home, I'll
stir around and get a
candle and light ye up the ould crazy stairs and see that ye
don't come to anny harm, for be this time Mr. Daly'll be that
impatient to see your
honor that he'll be taking the roof off."
"YE DON'T SAY, SIR!"
He conducted me cautiously and tenderly up the stairs,
lighting the way and protecting
me with friendly warnings,
then pushed the door open and bowed me in and went his way,
HE LIGHTED ME UP THE STAIRS.
mumbling hearty things about my wonderfuleye for points of a dog. Mr. Daly was
writing and had his back
to me. He glanced over
his shoulder presently,
then jumped up and said—
"Oh, dear me, I forgot
all about giving instructions.
I was just
writing you to beg a
thousand pardons. But
how is it you are here?
How did
you get by that
Irishman? You are the
first man that's done it
in five and
twenty years.
You didn't bribe him, I
know that; there's not
money enough in
New
York to do it. And you didn't persuade him; he is all ice and
iron: there
isn't a soft place nor a warm one in him anywhere.
What is
your secret? Look here; you owe me a hundred
dollars for unintentionally giving you a chance to perform
a
miracle—for it is a miracle that you've done."
"That is all right," I said, "collect it of Jimmy Lewis."
That good dog not only did me that good turn in the time
of my need, but he won for me
the envious reputation among
all the theatrical people from the Atlantic to the Pacific
of
being the only man in history who had ever run the blockade
of Augustin Daly's
back door.
CHAPTER XLVI.
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who
would
escape hanging.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
the Train. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the
then remote
and sparsely peopled Mississippi valley,
vague tales and rumors of a mysterious body of
professional
murderers came wandering in from a country which
was constructively as far from us
as the constellations blinking
in space—India; vague tales and rumors of a
sect called
Thugs, who way laid travelers in lonely places and killed them
for the
contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales
which everybody liked to listen to and
nobody believed—
except with reservations. It was considered that the stories
had gathered bulk on their travels. The matter died down
and a lull followed. Then
Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew"
appeared, and made great talk for a while. One character in
it was a chief of Thugs—"Feringhea"—a mysterious and
terrible Indian who was as slippery and sly as a serpent, and
as deadly; and he stirred
up the Thug interest once more. But
it did not last. It presently died
again—this time to stay dead.
At first glance it seems strange that this should have
happened; but really it was not
strange—on the contrary, it
was natural; I mean on our side of the water. For
the source
whence the Thug tales mainly came was a Government Report,
and without
doubt was not republished in America; it was
probably never even seen there. Government
Reports have
no general circulation. They are distributed to the few, and
are not
always read by those few. I heard of this Report for
the first time a day or two ago, and borrowed it. It is full of
fascinations; and it
turns those dim, dark fairy tales of my
boyhood days into realities.
The Report was made in 1839 by Major Sleeman, of the
Indian Service, and was printed
in Calcutta in 1840. It is a
clumsy, great, fat, poor sample of the printer's art, but
good
enough for a government printing-office in that old day and in
that remote
region, perhaps. To Major Sleeman was given
the general superintendence of the giant
task of ridding India
of Thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished
it. It was the Augean Stables over again. Captain Vallancey,
writing in a Madras journal
in those old times, makes this
remark:
"The day that sees this far-spread evil eradicated from India and known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize British rule in the East."
He did not overestimate the magnitude and difficulty of
the work, nor the immensity of
the credit which would justly
be due to British rule in case it was accomplished.
Thuggee became known to the British authorities in India
about 1810, but its wide
prevalence was not suspected; it was
not regarded as a serious matter, and no systematic
measures
were taken for its suppression until about 1830. About that
time Major
Sleeman captured Eugene Sue's Thug-chief,
"Feringhea," and got him to turn King's
evidence. The
revelations were so stupefying that Sleeman was not able to
believe
them. Sleeman thought he knew every criminal within
his jurisdiction, and that the worst
of them were merely
thieves; but Feringhea told him that he was in reality living
in the midst of a swarm of professional murderers; that they
had been all about him for
many years, and that they buried
their dead close by. These seemed insane tales; but
Feringhea
said come and see—and he took him to a grave and dug up a
hundred bodies, and told him all the circumstances of the
killings, and named the Thugs who had done the work. It
was a staggering business.
Sleeman captured some of these
Thugs and proceeded to examine them separately, and with
proper precautions against collusion; for he would not believe
any Indian's
unsupported word. The evidence gathered proved
the truth of what Feringhea had said, and
also revealed the
fact that gangs of Thugs were plying their trade all over
India.
The astonished government now took hold of Thuggee,
and for ten years made systematic
and relentless war upon it,
and finally destroyed it. Gang after gang was captured,
tried,
and punished. The Thugs were harried and hunted from one
end of India to
the other. The government got all their
secrets out of them; and also got the names of
the members
of the bands, and recorded them in a book, together with
their
birthplaces and places of residence.
The Thugs were worshipers of Bhowanee; and to this god
they sacrificed anybody that
came handy; but they kept the
dead man's things themselves, for the god cared for
nothing
but the corpse. Men were initiated into the sect with solemn
ceremonies.
Then they were taught how to strangle a person
with the sacred choke-cloth, but were not
allowed to perform
officially with it until after long practice. No half-educated
strangler could choke a man to death quickly enough to keep
him from uttering a
sound—a muffled scream, gurgle, gasp,
moan, or something of the sort; but the
expert's work was
instantaneous: the cloth was whipped around the victim's neck,
there was a sudden twist, and the head fell silently forward,
the eyes starting from the
sockets; and all was over. The
Thug carefully guarded against resistance. It was usual
to
to get the victims to sit down, for that was the handiest
position for
business.
If the Thug had planned India itself it could not have been
more conveniently arranged
for the needs of his occupation.
There were no public conveyances. There were no conveyances
for hire. The traveler
went on foot or in a bullock cart or on a
horse which he bought for the purpose. As soon
as he was out
of his own little State or principality he was among strangers;
nobody knew him, nobody took note of him, and from that time
his movements could no
longer be traced. He did not stop in
towns or villages, but camped outside of them and
sent his servants
in to buy provisions. There were no habitations between
villages. Whenever he was
between villages he was an easy prey,
particularly as he usually traveled by night, to
avoid the heat.
He was always being overtaken by strangers who offered him
the
protection of their company, or asked for the protection of
his—and these
strangers were often Thugs, as he presently
found out to his cost. The landholders, the
native police, the
petty princes, the village officials, the customs officers were in
many cases protectors and harborers of the Thugs, and
betrayed travelers to them
for a share of the spoil. At first
this condition of things made it next to impossible
for the
government to catch the marauders; they were spirited away
by these
watchful friends. All through a vast continent, thus
infested, helpless people of every
caste and kind moved along
the paths and trails in couples and groups silently by night,
carrying the commerce of the country—treasure, jewels,
money, and petty
batches of silks, spices, and all manner of
wares. It was a paradise for the Thug.
When the autumn opened, the Thugs began to gather together
by pre-concert. Other people had to have interpreters
at every turn, but not the
Thugs; they could talk together,
no matter how far apart they
were born, for they had a
language of their own, and they had secret signs by which
they knew each other for Thugs; and they were always friends.
Even their
diversities of religion and caste were sunk in
devotion to their calling, and the Moslem
and the high-caste
and low-caste Hindoo were staunch and affectionate brothers
in Thuggery.
When a gang had been assembled, they had religious
workship, and waited for an omen.
They had definite notions
about the omens. The cries of certain animals were good
omens, the cries of certain other creatures were bad omens. A
bad omen would stop
proceedings and send the men home.
The sword and the strangling-cloth were sacred emblems.
The Thugs worshiped the sword
at home before going out to
the assembling-place; the strangling-cloth was worshiped at
the place of assembly. The chiefs of most of the bands performed
the religious ceremonies themselves; but the Kaets
delegated them to certain official stranglers (Chaurs). The
rites of the Kaets were so holy that no one but the Chaur was
allowed to touch the
vessels and other things used in them.
Thug methods exhibit a curious mixture of caution and the
absence of it; cold business
calculation and sudden, unreflecting
impulse; but there were two details which were constant,
and not subject to
caprice: patient persistence in following up
the prey, and pitilessness when the time
came to act.
Caution was exhibited in the strength of the bands. They
never felt comfortable and
confident unless their strength exceeded
that of any party of travelers they were likely to
meet by four or fivefold. Yet
it was never their purpose to
attack openly, but only when the victims were off their
guard.
When they got hold of a party of travelers they often moved
along in their
company several days, using all manner of arts
to win their friendship and get their
confidence. At last,
when this was accomplished to their satisfaction, the real business
began. A few Thugs were privately detached and sent forward
in the dark to select a good killing-place and dig the graves.
When the rest reached the spot a halt was called, for a rest or
a smoke. The
travelers were invited to sit. By signs, the chief
appointed certain Thugs to sit down in front of the travelers as
if to wait upon them, others to sit down beside them and
engage them in conversation, and certain expert stranglers to
stand behind the travelers and be ready when the signal was
given. The signal was usually some commonplace remark,
like "Bring the tobacco." Sometimes a considerable wait
ensued after all the actors were in their places—the chief was
biding his time, in order to make everything sure. Meantime,
the talk droned on, dim figures moved about in the dull light,
peace and tranquility reigned, the travelers resigned themselves
to the pleasant reposefulness and comfort of the situation, unconscious
of the death-angels standing motionless at their
backs. The time was ripe, now, and the signal came: "Bring
the tobacco." There was a mute swift movement, all in the
same instant the men at each victim's sides seized his hands,
the man in front seized his feet, and pulled, the man at his
back whipped the cloth around his neck and gave it a twist—
the head sunk forward, the tragedy was over. The bodies
were stripped and covered up in the graves, the spoil packed
for transportation, then the Thugs gave pious thanks to
Bhowance, and departed on further holy service.
The Report shows that the travelers moved in exceedingly
small groups—twos,
threes, fours, as a rule; a party with a
dozen in it was rare. The Thugs themselves seem
to have been
the only people who moved in force. They went about in
gangs of 10,
15, 25, 40, 60, 100, 150, 200, 250, and one gang of
310 is mentioned. Considering their
numbers, their catch was
not extraordinary—particularly when you consider
that they
were not in the least fastidious, but took anybody they could
get,
whether rich or poor, and sometimes even killed children.
Now and then they killed
women, but it was considered
sinful to do it, and unlucky. The "season" was six or eight
months long. One season the half dozen Bundelkand and
Gwalior gangs aggregated 712 men, and they murdered 210
people. One season the Malwa and Kandeish gangs aggregated
702 men, and they murdered 232. One season the Kandeish
and Berar gangs aggregated 963 men, and they murdered
385 people.
Here is the tally-sheet of a gang of sixty Thugs for a whole
season—gang under two noted chiefs, "Chotee and Sheik Nungoo
from Gwalior":
"Left Poora, in Jhansee, and on arrival at Sarora murdered a traveler.
"On nearly reaching Bhopal, met 3 Brahmins, and murdered them.
"Cross the Nerbudda; at a village called Hutteea, murdered a Hindoo.
"Went through Aurungabad to Walagow; there met a Havildar of the
barber caste and 5
sepoys (native soldiers); in the evening came to Jokur, and
in the
morning killed them near the place where the treasure-bearers were
killed the year
before.
"Between Jokur and Dholeea met a sepoy of the shepherd caste; killed
him in the
jungle.
"Passed through Dholeea and lodged in a village; two miles beyond, on
the road to
Indore, met a Byragee (beggar—holy mendicant); murdered him
at the Thapa.
"In the morning, beyond the Thapa, fell in with 3 Marwarie travelers;
murdered them.
"Near a village on the banks of the Taptee met 4 travelers and killed
them.
"Between Choupra and Dhoreea met a Marwarie; murdered him.
"At Dhoreea met 3 Marwaries; took them two miles and murdered
them.
Two miles further on, overtaken by three treasure-bearers; took them
two miles and
murdered them in the jungle.
"Came on to Khurgore Bateesa in Indore, divided spoil, and dispersed.
"A total of 27 men murdered on one expedition."
Chotee (to save his neck) was informer, and furnished these
facts.
Several things are noticeable about his resume. 1.
Business brevity; 2, absence of
emotion; 3, smallness of the
parties encountered by the 60; 4, variety in character and
quality of the game captured; 5, Hindoo and Mohammedan
chiefs in business together
for Bhowanee; 6, the sacred caste
of the Brahmins not respected by either; 7, nor yet
the character
of that mendicant, that Byragee.
A beggar is a holy creature, and some of the gangs spared
him on that account, no
matter how slack business might be;
but other gangs slaughtered not only him, but even
that
sacredest of sacred creatures, the fakeer—that
repulsive skin-and-bone
thing that goes around naked and mats his bushy
hair with dust and dirt, and so
beflours his lean body with
ashes that he looks like a specter. Sometimes a fakeer
trusted
a shade too far in the protection of his sacredness. In the
middle of a
tally-sheet of Feringhea's, who had been out with
forty Thugs, I find a case of the
kind. After the killing of
thirty-nine men and one woman, the fakeer appears on the
scene:
"Approaching Doregow, met 3 pundits; also a fakeer, mounted on a
pony; he was
plastered over with sugar to collect flies, and was covered with
them. Drove off the
fakeer, and killed the other three.
"Leaving Doregow, the fakeer joined again, and went on in company to
Raojana; met 6
Khutries on their way from Bombay to Nagpore. Drove off
the fakeer with stones, and
killed the 6 men in camp, and buried them in the
grove.
"Next day the fakeer joined again; made him leave at Mana. Beyond
there, fell in with
two Kahars and a sepoy, and came on towards the place
selected for the murder. When near
it, the fakeer came again. Losing all
patience with him, gave Mithoo, one of the gang, 5
rupees ($2.50) to murder
him, and take the sin upon himself. All four
were strangled, including the
fakeer. Surprised to find among the fakeer's effects 30
pounds of coral, 350
strings of small pearls, 15 strings of large pearls, and a gilt
necklace."
It it curious, the little effect that time has upon a really
interesting circumstance.
This one, so old, so long ago gone
down into oblivion, reads with the same freshness and
charm
that attach to the news in the morning paper; one's spirits go
up, then
down, then up again, following the chances which
the fakeer is running; now you hope,
now you despair, now
you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and
you feel a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering
through you, and without
thinking, you put out your hand to
pat Mithoo on the back, when—puff! the
whole thing has
vanished away, there is nothing there; Mithoo and all the
crowd have been dust and ashes and forgotten, oh, so many,
many, many lagging years! And then comes a sense of
injury: you don't know whether
Mithoo got the swag, along
with the sin, or had to divide up the swag and keep all the
sin
himself. There is no literary art about a government report.
It stops a story
right in the most interesting place.
These reports of Thug expeditions run along interminably
in one monotonous tune: "Met
a sepoy—killed him; met 5
pundits—killed them; met 4 Rajpoots and
a woman—killed
them"—and so on, till the statistics get to be
pretty dry.
But this small trip of Feringhea's Forty had some little variety
about
it. Once they came across a man hiding in a grave—
a
thief; he had stolen 1,100 rupees from Dhunroj Seith of
Parowtee. They strangled him and
took the money. They
had no patience with thieves. They killed two treasure-bearers,
and got 4,000 rupees. They came across
two bullocks
"laden with copper pice," and killed the four drivers and took
the
money. There must have been half a ton of it. I think
it takes a double handful of pice
to make an anna, and 16
annas to make a rupee; and even in those days the rupee was
worth only half a dollar. Coming back over their tracks
from Baroda, they had
another picturesque stroke of luck:
"The Lohars of Oodeypore" put a traveler in their
charge
"for safety." Dear, dear, across this abyssmal gulf of time we
still see
Feringhea's lips uncover his teeth, and through the
dim haze we catch the incandescent
glimmer of his smile. He
accepted that trust, good man; and so we know what went
with the traveler.
Even Rajahs had no terrors for Feringhea; he came across
an elephant-driver belonging
to the Rajah of Oodeypore and
promptly strangled him.
"A total of 100 men and 5 women murdered on this expedition."
Among the reports of expeditions we find mention of
victims of almost every quality
and estate:
work.Fakeers.Treasure-bearers.Mendicants.Children.Shepherds.Holy-water carriers.Cowherds.Archers.Carpenters.Gardeners.Table-waiters.Peddlers.Shopkeepers.Weavers.Tailors.Palanquin-bearers.Priests.Blacksmiths.Farmers.Bankers.Policemen (native).Bullock-drivers.Boatmen.Pastry cooks.Male servants seeking
work.Merchants.Grooms.Grass-cutters.Mecca pilgrims.
Also a prince's cook; and even the water-carrier of that
sublime lord of lords and
king of kings, the Governor-General
of India! How broad they were in their tastes! They
also
murdered actors—poor wandering barn-stormers. There are
two
instances recorded; the first one by a gang of Thugs
under a chief who soils a great
name borne by a better man—
Kipling's deathless "Gungadin":
"After murdering 4 sepoys, going on toward Indore, met 4 strolling
players, and
persuaded them to come with us, on the pretense that we would
see their performance at
the next stage. Murdered them at a temple near
Bhopal."
Second instance:
"At Deohuttee, joined by comedians. Murdered them eastward of that
place."
But this gang was a particularly bad crew. On that expedition
they murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars. And
yet Bhowanee protected them; for
once when they were
strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going by close
at
hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, Bhowanee
made a camel burst out at the same moment with a
roar that drowned the scream; and
before the man could
repeat it the breath was choked out of his body.
The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an
awful sacrilege, and even
the Thugs recognized this; yet now
and then the lust for blood was too strong, and so they did
kill a few cow-keepers. In
one of these instances the witness
who killed the cowherd said, "In Thuggee this is
strictly forbidden,
and is an act from which no good can
come. I was
ill of a fever for ten days afterward. I do believe that evil
will
follow the murder of a man with a cow. If there be no
cow it does not signify." Another
Thug said he held the
cowherd's feet while this witness did the strangling. He felt
no concern, "because the bad fortune of such a deed is upon
the strangler and not
upon the assistants; even if there should
be a hundred of them."
There were thousands of Thugs roving over India constantly,
during many generations. They made Thuggee a
hereditary vocation and taught it to
their sons and to their
son's sons. Boys were in full membership as early as 16 years
of age; veterans were still at work at 70. What was the
fascination, what was the
impulse? Apparently, it was partly
piety, largely gain, and there is reason to suspect
that the
sport afforded was the chiefest fascination of all. Meadows
Taylor makes a Thug in one of his books claim that the pleasure
of killing men was the white man's beast-hunting instinct
enlarged, refined,
ennobled. I will quote the passage:
CHAPTER XLVII.
Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an eager
impulse
to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty. To save three-quarters,
count sixty.
To save it all, count sixty-five.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Thug said:
"How many of you English are passionately devoted to sporting!
Your days and months are passed in its excitement. A
tiger, a panther, a buffalo
or a hog rouses your utmost energies for
its destruction—you even risk your
lives in its pursuit. How much higher
game is a Thug's!"
That must really be the secret of the rise and development
of Thuggee. The joy of
killing! the joy of seeing killing
done—these are traits of the human race at
large. We white
people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the
restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; Thugs
who long ago enjoyed the
slaughter of the Roman arena, and
later the burning of doubtful Christians by authentic
Christians
in the public squares, and who now, with the Thugs of Spain
and Nimes,
flock to enjoy the blood and misery of the bullring.
We
have no tourists of either sex or any religion who
are able to resist the delights of
the bull-ring when opportunity
offers; and we are gentle Thugs in the hunting-season,
and
love to chase a tame rabbit and kill it. Still, we have made
some
progress—microscopic, and in truth scarcely worth
mentioning, and certainly
nothing to be proud of—still, it is
progress: we no longer take pleasure in
slaughtering or burning
helpless men. We have reached a little altitude where we
may look down upon the
Indian Thugs with a complacent
shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries
hence,
when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.
There are many indications that the Thug often hunted
men for the mere sport of it;
that the fright and pain of the
quarry were no more to him than are the fright and pain
of
the rabbit or the stag to us; and that he was no more ashamed
of beguiling his
game with deceits and abusing its trust than
are we when we have imitated a wild
animal's call and shot it
when it honored us with its confidence and came to see what
we wanted:
"Madara, son of Nihal, and I, Ramzam, set out from Kotdee in the cold
weather and
followed the high road for about twenty days in search of
travelers, until we came to
Selempore, where we met a very old man going to
the east. We won his confidence in this
manner: he carried a load which
was too heavy for his old age; I said to him, 'You are
an old man, I will aid
you in carrying your load, as you are from my part of the
country.' He
said, 'Very well, take me with you.' So we took him with us to Selempore,
where we slept that night. We woke him next morning before dawn and set
out, and
at the distance of three miles we seated him to rest while it was still
very dark.
Madara was ready behind him, and strangled him. He never
spoke a word. He was about 60
or 70 years of age."
Another gang fell in with a couple of barbers and persuaded
them to come along in
their company by promising them the
job of shaving the whole crew—30 Thugs.
At the place appointed
for the murder 15 got shaved, and actually paid the
barbers for their work. Then
killed them and took back the
money.
A gang of forty-two Thugs came across two Brahmins and
a shopkeeper on the road,
beguiled them into a grove and got
up a concert for their
entertainment. While these poor fellows
were listening to the music the stranglers were
standing behind
them; and at the proper moment for dramatic effect they
applied
the noose.
The most devoted fisherman must have a bite at least as
often as once a week or his
passion will cool and he will put
up his tackle. The tiger-sportsman must find a tiger
at least
once a fortnight or he will get tired and quit. The elephant-hunter's
enthusiasm will waste away little by little, and his
zeal will perish at last if he plod around a month without finding
a member of that noble family to assassinate.
But when the lust in the hunter's heart is for the noblest of
all quarries, man, how
different is the case! and how watery
and poor is the zeal and how childish the
endurance of those
other hunters by comparison. Then, neither hunger, nor
thirst,
nor fatigue, nor deferred hope, nor monotonous disappointment,
nor leaden-footed lapse of time can conquer the
hunter's
patience or weaken the joy of his quest or cool the
splendid rage of his desire. Of all
the hunting-passions that
burn in the breast of man, there is none that can lift him
superior to discouragements like these but the one—the royal
sport, the
supreme sport, whose quarry is his brother. By
comparison, tiger-hunting is a colorless
poor thing, for all it
has been so bragged about.
Why, the Thug was content to tramp patiently along,
afoot, in the wasting heat of
India, week after week, at an
average of nine or ten miles a day, if he might but hope
to
find game some time or other and refresh his longing soul with
blood. Here is
an instance:
"I (Ramzam) and Hyder set out, for the purpose of strangling
travelers, from Guddapore, and proceeded via the Fort of Julalabad,
Newulgunge,
Bangermow, on the banks of the Ganges (upwards of 100
miles), from
whence we returned by another route. Still no travelers! till
we reached Bowaneegunge,
where we fell in with a traveler, a boatman; we
inveigled him and about two miles east
of there Hyder strangled him as he
stood—for he was troubled and afraid, and
would not sit. We then made a
long journey (about 130 miles) and
reached Hussunpore Bundwa, where at
the tank we fell in with a traveler—he
slept there that night; next morning
we followed him and tried to win his confidence; at
the distance of two miles
we endeavored to induce him to sit down—but he
would not having become
aware of us. I attempted to strangle him as he walked along, but
did not
succeed; both of us then fell upon him, he made a great outery, 'They are
murdering me:' at length we strangled him and flung his body into a well.
After this we
returned to our homes, having been out a month and traveled
about 260 miles. A total of
two men murdered on the expedition."
And here is another case—related by the terrible Futty Khan,
a man with a
tremendous record, to be re-mentioned by and by;
"I, with three others, traveled for about 45 days a distance of about 200
miles in
search of victims along the highway to Bundwa and returned by Davodpore
(another 200 miles) during which journey we had only one murder,
which happened in this manner. Four miles to the cast of Noubustaghat we
fell in with a
traveler, an old man. I, with Koshal and Hyder, inveigled him
and accompanied him that
day within 3 miles of Rampoor, where, after dark,
in a lonely place, we got him to sit
down and rest; and while I kept him in
talk, seated before him, Hyder behind strangled
him: he made no resistance.
Koshal stabbed him under the arms and in the throat, and we
flung the body
into a running stream. We got about 4 or 5 rupees each ($2 or
$2.50). We
then proceeded homewards. A total of one man murdered on this expedition."
There. They tramped 400 miles, were gone about three
months, and harvested two dollars
and a half apiece. But the
mere pleasure of the hunt was sufficient. That was pay
enongh.
They did no grumbling.
Every now and then in this big book one comes across that
pathetic remark: "We tried
to get him to sit down but he
would not." It tells the whole story. Some accident had
awakened the suspicion in him that these smooth friends who
had been petting and
coddling him and making him feel so
safe and so fortunate after his forlorn and lonely
wanderings
were the dreaded Thugs; and now their ghastly invitation to
"sit and
rest" had confirmed its truth. He knew there was
no help for him, and that he was
looking his last upon earthly
things, but "he would not sit." No, not that—it
was too
awful to think of!
There are a number of instances which indicate that when
a man had once tasted the
regal joys of man-hunting he could
not be content with the dull montony of a crimeless
life after
ward. Example, from a Thug's testimony:
"We passed through to Kurnaul, where we found a former Thug named
Junooa, an old
comrade of ours, who had turned religious mendicant and
become a disciple and holy. He
came to us in the serai and weeping with
joy returned to his old trade."
Neither wealth nor honors nor dignities could satisfy a reformed
Thug for long. He would throw them all away, some
day, and go back to the lurid pleasures of hunting men, and
being hunted himself by the British.
Ramzam was taken into a great native grandee's service and
given authority over five
villages. "My authority extended
over these people to summons them to my presence, to
make
them stand or sit. I dressed well, rode my pony, and had two
sepoys, a scribe
and a village guard to attend me. During
three years I used to pay each village a
monthly visit, and no
one suspected that I was a Thug! The chief man used to wait
on me to transact business, and as I passed along, old and
young made their salaam to
me."
And yet during that very three years he got leave of
absence "to attend a wedding."
and instead went off on a
Thugging lark with six other Thugs and hunted the highway
for fifteen days!—with satisfactory results.
Afterwards he held a great office under a Rajah. There he
had ten miles of country
under his command and a military
guard of fifteen men, with authority to call out 2,000
more
upon occasion. But the British got on his track, and they
crowded him so that
he had to give himself up. See what a
figure he was when he was gotten up for style and
had all his
things on: "I was fully armed—a sword, shield, pistols, a
matchlock musket and a flint gun, for I was fond of being thus
arrayed, and when so
armed feared not though forty men
stood before me."
He gave himself up and proudly proclaimed himself a Thug.
Then by request he agreed to
betray his friend and pal,
Buhram, a Thug with the most tremendous record in India.
"I went to the house where Buhram slept (often has he led
our
gangs!) I woke him, he knew me well, and came outside
to me. It was a cold
night, so under pretence of warming
myself, but in reality to have light for his seizure
by the guards,
I lighted some straw and made a blaze. We were warming
our hands. The guards drew around us. I said to them,
"This is Buhram," and he was seized just as a cat seizes a
mouse. Then Buhram said, "I am a Thug! my father was a
Thug, my grandfather was a Thug, and I have thugged with
many!"
So spoke the mighty hunter, the mightiest of the mighty,
the Gordon Cumming of his
day. Not much regret noticeable
in it.*
"Having planted a bullet in the shoulder-bone of an elephant, and caused the
agonized creature to lean for support against a tree, I proceeded to brew some coffee.
Having refreshed myself, taking observations of the elephant's spasms and writhings
between the sips, I resolved to make experiments on vulnerable points, and,
approaching very near, I fired several bullets at different parts of his enormous skull.
He only acknowledged the shots by a salaam-like movement of his trunk, with the
point of which he gently touched the wounds with a striking and peculiar action.
Surprised and shocked to find that I was only prolonging the suffering of the noble
beast, which bore its trials with such dignified composure, I resolved to finish the
proceeding with all possible despatch, and accordingly opened fire upon him from
the
left side. Aiming at the shoulder, I fired six shots with the two-grooved rifle,
which
must have eventually proved mortal, after which I fired six shots at the same
part
with the Dutch six-pounder. Large tears now trickled down from his eyes,
which he
slowly shut and opened, his colossal frame shivered convulsively, and falling
on his side he expired."—Gordon Cumming.
So many many times this Official Report leaves one's
curiosity unsatisfied. For
instance, here is a little paragraph
out of the record of a certain band of 193 Thugs,
which has
that defect:
"Fell in with Lall Sing Subahdar and his family, consisting of nine persons.
Traveled with them two days, and the third put them all to death
except the two children, little boys of one and a half years old."
There it stops. What did they do with those poor little
fellows? What was their
subsequent history? Did they
purpose training them up as Thugs? How could they take
care of such little creatures on a march which stretched over
several months? No
one seems to have cared to ask any
questions about the babies. But I do wish I knew.
One would be apt to imagine that the Thugs were utterly
callous, utterly destitute of
human feelings, heartless toward
their own families as well as toward other people's; but this
was not so. Like all
other Indians, they had a passionate love
for their kin. A shrewd British officer who
knew the Indian
character, took that characteristic into account in laying his
plans for the capture of Eugene Sue's famous Feringhea. He
found out Feringhea's
hiding-place, and sent a guard by night
to seize him, but the squad was awkward and he
got away.
However, they got the rest of the family—the mother, wife,
child, and brother—and brought them to the officer, at Jubbulpore;
the officer did not fret, but bided his time: "I knew
Feringhea would not go far while links so dear to him were in
my hands." He was right.
Feringhea knew all the danger
he was running by staying in the neighborhood, still he
could
not tear himself away. The officer found that he divided his time
between
five villages where he had relatives and friends who
could get news for him from his
family in Jubbulpore jail;
and that he never slept two consecutive nights in the same
village. The officer traced out his several haunts, then pounced
upon all the five
villages on the one night and at the same
hour, and got his man.
Another example of family affection. A little while
previously to the capture of
Feringhea's family, the British
officer had captured Feringhea's foster-brother, leader
of a
gang of ten, and had tried the eleven and condemned them to
be hanged.
Feringhea's captured family arrived at the jail
the day before the execution was to take
place. The foster-brother,
Jhurhoo, entreated to be
allowed to see the aged
mother and the others. The prayer was granted, and this is
what took place—it is the British officer who speaks:
"In the morning, just before going to the scaffold, the interview took
place before
me. He fell at the old woman's feet and begged that she would
relieve him from the
obligations of the milk with which she had nourished
him from infancy, as he was about
to die before he could fulfill any of them.
She placed her hands on his head, and he
knelt, and she said she forgave him
all, and bid him die like a man."
If a capable artist should make a picture of it, it would be
full of dignity and
solemnity and pathos; and it could touch
you. You would imagine it to be anything but
what it was.
There is reverence there, and tenderness, and gratefulness, and
compasion, and resignation, and fortitude, and self-respect—
and no sense of
disgrace, no thought of dishonor. Everything
is there that goes to make a noble parting,
and give it a
moving grace and beauty and dignity. And yet one of these
people is
a Thug and the other a mother of Thugs! The incongruities
of our human nature seem to reach their limit here.
I wish to make note of one curious thing while I think of
it. One of the very
commonest remarks to be found in this
bewildering array of Thug confessions is this:
"Strangled him and threw him in a well!" In one case
they threw
sixteen into a well—and they had thrown others
in the same well before. It
makes a body thirsty to read
about it.
And there is another very curious thing. The bands of
Thugs had private graceyards. They did not like to kill and
bury at random, here and there
and everywhere. They preferred
to wait, and toll the victims along, and get to one of
their regular
burying-places (bheels) if they could. In the
little kingdom of Oude,
which was about half as big as Ireland
and about as big as the State of Maine, they had
two hundred
and seventy-four bheels. They were scattered along
fourteen
hundred miles of road, at an average of only five miles apart,
and the British government traced out and located each and
every one of them and
set them down on the map.
The Oude bands seldom went out of their own country, but
they did a thriving business
within its borders. So did outside
bands who came in and helped. Some of the Thug
leaders of
Oude were noted for their successful careers. Each of four of
them
confessed to above 300 murders; another to nearly 400;
our friend Ramzam to 604—he is the one who got leave of
absence to attend a wedding and went thugging instead; and
he is also the one who betrayed Buhram to the British.
But the biggest records of all were the murder-lists of Futty
Khan and Buhram. Futty
Khan's number is smaller than
Ramzam's, but he is placed at the head because his average is
the best in Oude-Thug history per year of service. His
slaughter was 508 men in twenty years, and he was still a
young man when the
British stopped his industry. Buhram's
list was 931 murders, but it took him forty
years. His average
was one man and nearly all of another man per month for
forty years, but Futty
Khan's average was two men and a little
of another man per month
during his twenty years of usefulness.
There is one very striking thing which I wish to call attention
to. You have surmised from the listed callings followed
by the victims of the
Thugs that nobody could travel the
Indian roads unprotected and live to get through;
that the
Thugs respected no quality, no vocation, no religion, nobody;
that they
killed every unarmed man that came in their way.
That is wholly true—with one
reservation. In all the long
file of Thug confessions an English
traveler is mentioned but
once—and this is what the Thug says of the
circumstance:
"He was on his way from Mhow to Bombay. We studiously avoided him.
He proceeded next morning with a number of travelers who had sought
his
protection, and they took the road to Baroda."
We do not know who he was; he flits aross the page of
this rusty old book and
disappears in the obscurity beyond;
but he is an impressive figure, moving through that
valley
of death serene and unafraid, clothed in the might of the English
name.
We have now followed the big official book through, and
we understand what Thuggee
was, what a bloody terror it
was, what a desolating scourge it was. In 1830 the English
found this cancerous organization imbedded in the vitals of the
empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted,
protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates—
big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and
native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people,
through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about
its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations,
and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old
custom. If ever there was an unpromising task, if ever there
was a hopeless task in the world, surely it was offered here—
the task of conquering Thuggee. But that little handful of
English officials in India set their sturdy and confident grip
upon it, and ripped it out, root and branch! How modest do
Captain Vallancey's words sound now, when we read them
again, knowing what we know:
"The day that sees this far-spread evil completely eradicated from India,
and known
only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize British rule in the
East."
It would be hard to word a claim more modestly than that
for this most noble work.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have
somebody to divide it with.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
left Bombay for Allahabad by a night train. It is
the
custom of the country to avoid day travel when it
can conveniently be done. But there is
one trouble:
while you can seemingly "secure" the two lower berths by
making early
application, there is no ticket as witness of it,
and no other producible evidence in
case your proprietorship
shall chance to be challenged. The word "engaged" appears
on the window, but it doesn't state who the compartment is
engaged for. If your Satan and your Barney arrive before
somebody else's servants, and
spread the bedding on the two
sofas and then stand guard till you come, all will be
well; but
if they step aside on an errand, they may find the beds promoted
to the two shelves, and somebody else's demons standing
guard over their master's
beds, which in the meantime have
been spread upon your sofas.
You do not pay anything extra for your sleeping place; that
is where the trouble lies.
If you buy a fare-ticket and fail
to use it, there is room thus made available for
someone else;
but if the place were secured to you it would remain vacant,
and yet
your ticket would secure you another place when you
were
presently ready to travel.
However, no explanation of such a system can make it
seem quite rational to a person
who has been used to a more
rational system. If our people had the arranging of it, we
should charge extra for securing the place, and then the road
would suffer no loss
if the purchaser did not occupy it.
The present system encourages good manners—and also
discourages them. If a
young girl has a lower berth and an
elderly lady comes in, it is usual for the girl to
offer her place
to this late comer; and it is usual for the late comer to thank
her courteously and take it. But the thing happens differently
sometimes. When we were
ready to leave Bombay my daughter's
satchels were holding possession of her berth—a lower
one. At the last
moment, a middle-aged American lady
swarmed into the compartment, followed by native
porters
laden with her baggage. She was growling and snarling and
scolding, and
trying to make herself phenomenally disagreeable;
and
succeeding. Without a word, she hoisted the
satchels into the hanging shelf, and took
possession of that
lower berth.
On one of our trips Mr. Smythe and I got out at a station
to walk up and down, and
when we came back Smythe's bed
was in the hanging shelf and an English cavalry officer
was in
bed on the sofa which he had lately been occupying. It was
mean to be glad
about it, but it is the way we are made;
I could not have been gladder if it had been my
enemy that
had suffered this misfortune. We all like to see people in
trouble, if
it doesn't cost us anything. I was so happy over
Mr. Smythe's chagrin that I couldn't go
to sleep for thinking
of it and enjoying it. I knew he supposed the officer had
committed the robbery himself, whereas without a doubt the
officer's servant had done it
without his knowledge. Mr.
Smythe kept this incident warm in his heart, and longed for
a chance to get even with somebody for it. Sometime afterward
the opportunity came, in Calcutta. We were leaving
on a 24-hour journey to
Darjeeling. Mr. Barclay, the general
superintendent, has made special provision for our
accommodation,
Mr. Smythe said; so there was no need
to hurry about
getting to the train; consequently, we were a little late.
When we arrived, the usual immense turmoil and confusion of
a great Indian station were in full blast. It was an immoderately
long train, for all the natives of India were going by it
somewhither, and the native officials were being pestered to
frenzy by belated and anxious people. They didn't know
where our car was, and couldn't remember having received
any orders about it. It was a deep disappointment; moreover,
it looked as if our half of our party would be left behind
altogether. Then Satan came running and said he had found
a compartment with one shelf and one sofa unoccupied, and
had made our beds and had stowed our baggage. We rushed
to the place, and just as the train was ready to pull out and
the porters were slamming the doors to, all down the line, an
officer of the Indian Civil Service, a good friend of ours, put
his head in and said:—
"I have been hunting for you everywhere. What are you
doing here? Don't you
know—"
The train started before he could finish. Mr. Smythe's
opportunity was come. His
bedding, on the shelf, at once
changed places with the bedding—a
stranger's—that was
occupying the sofa that was opposite to mine. About ten
o'clock we stopped somewhere, and a large Englishman of
official military bearing
stepped in. We pretended to be asleep.
The lamps were covered, but there was light
enough for us to
note his look of surprise. He stood there, grand and fine,
peering down at Smythe, and wondering in silence at the
situation. After a bit he
said:—
"Well!" And that was all.
But that was enough. It was easy to understand. It
meant: "This is extraordinary. This
is high-handed. I
haven't had an experience like this before."
He sat down on his baggage, and for twenty minutes we
watched him through our
eyelashes, rocking and swaying there
to the motion of the train. Then we came to a station, and he
got up and went out, muttering: "I must find a lower berth,
or wait over." His servant came presently and carried away
his things.
Mr. Smythe's sore place was healed, his hunger for revenge
was satisfied. But he
couldn't sleep, and neither could I; for
this was a vencrable old car, and nothing about
it was taut.
The closet door slammed all night, and defied every fastening
we
could invent. We got up very much jaded, at dawn, and
stepped out at a way station; and,
while we were taking a cup
of coffee, that Englishman ranged up alongside, and somebody
said to him:
SMYTHE'S REVENGE.
"So you didn't stop off, after all?"
"No. The guard found a place for me that had been
engaged and not occupied. I had a
whole saloon car all to
myself—oh, quite palatial! I never had such luck in
my
life."
That was our car, you see. We moved into it, straight off,
the family and all. But I
asked the English gentleman to remain,
and he did. A pleasant
man, an infantry colonel; and
doesn't know, yet, that Smythe robbed him of his berth,
but
thinks it was done by Smythe's servant without Smythe's
knowledge. He was
assisted in gathering this impression.
The Indian trains are manned by natives exclusively. The
Indian
stations—except very large and important ones—are
manned entirely
by natives, and so are the posts and telegraphs.
The rank
and file of the police are natives. All
these people are pleasant and accommodating. One
day I left
an express train to lounge about in that perennially ravishing
show,
the ebb and flow and whirl of gaudy natives, that is
always surging up and down the
spacious platform of a great
Indian station; and I lost myself in the ecstasy of it, and
when I turned, the train was moving swiftly away. I was
going to sit down and wait
for another train, as I would have
done at home; I had no thought of any other course.
But a
native official, who had a green flag in his hand, saw me, and
said
politely:
"Don't you belong in the train, sir?"
"Yes," I said.
He waved his flag, and the train came back! And he put
me aboard with as much ceremony
as if I had been the General
Superintendent. They are kindly people, the natives.
The face and the bearing that
indicate a surly spirit and a bad
heart seemed to me to be so rare among
Indians—so nearly
non-existent, in fact—that I sometimes wondered
if Thuggee
wasn't a dream, and not a reality. The bad hearts are
there,
but I believe that they are in a small, poor minority. One
thing is sure:
They are much the most interesting people in
the
world—and the nearest to being incomprehensible. At
any rate, the hardest to
account for. Their character and
their history, their customs and their religion, confront you
with riddles at every turn—riddles which are a trifle more
perplexing after they are explained than they were before.
You can get the facts of a custom—like caste, and Suttee,
and Thuggee, and so on—and with the facts a theory which
tries to explain, but never quite does it to your satisfaction.
You can never quite understand how so strange a thing could
have been born, nor why.
For instance—the Suttee. This is the explanation of it:
A woman who throws away her life when her husband dies is
instantly joined to him
again, and is forever afterward happy
with him in heaven; her family will build a little
monument
to her, or a temple, and will hold her in honor, and, indeed.
worship her
memory always; they will themselves be held
in honor by the public; the woman's
self-sacrifice has
conferred a noble and lasting distinction upon her posterity.
And, besides, see what she has escaped: If she had elected
to live, she would be a
disgraced person; she could not remarry;
her family would
despise her and disown her; she
would be a friendless outcast, and miserable all her
days.
Very well, you say, but the explanation is not complete
yet. How did people come to drift into such a strange custom?
What was the origin of the idea? "Well, nobody
knows; it was probably a revelation
sent down by the
gods." One more thing: Why was such a cruel death chosen
—why wouldn't a gentle one have answered? "Nobody
knows; maybe that was a
revelation, too."
No—you can never understand it. It all seems impossible.
You resolve to believe that a widow never burnt herself
willingly, but went to her death because she was afraid to defy
public opinion. But you
are not able to keep that position.
History drives you from it. Major Sleeman has a
convincing
case in one of his books. In his government on the Nerbudda
he made a brave attempt on the 28th of March, 1828, to put
down Suttee on his own hook and without warrant from the
Supreme Government of India. He could not foresee that the
Government would put it down itself eight months later. The
only backing he had was a bold nature and a compassionate
heart. He issued his proclamation abolishing the Suttee in his
district. On the morning of Tuesday—note the day of the
week—the 24th of the following November, Ummed Singh
Upadhya, head of the most respectable and most extensive
Brahmin family in the district, died, and presently came a deputation
of his sons and grandsons to beg that his old widow
might be allowed to burn herself upon his pyre. Sleeman
threatened to enforce his order, and punish severely any man
who assisted; and he placed a police guard to see that no one
did so. From the early morning the old widow of sixty-five
had been sitting on the bank of the sacred river by her dead,
waiting through the long hours for the permission; and at
last the refusal came instead. In one little sentence Sleeman
gives you a pathetic picture of this lonely old gray figure: all
day and all night "she remained sitting by the edge of the
water without eating or drinking." The next morning the
body of the husband was burned to ashes in a pit eight feet
square and three or four feet deep, in the view of several thousand
spectators. Then the widow waded out to a bare rock in
the river, and everybody went away but her sons and other
relations. All day she sat there on her rock in the blazing
sun without food or drink, and with no clothing but a sheet
over her shoulders.
The relatives remained with her and all tried to persuade
her to desist from her
purpose, for they deeply loved her. She
steadily refused. Then a part of the family went
to Sleeman's
house, ten miles away, and tried again to get him to let her
burn
herself. He refused, hoping to save her yet.
All that day she scorched in her sheet on the rock, and all
that night she kept her
vigil there in the bitter cold. Thursday
morning, in the sight of her relatives, she went through a
ceremonial which said
more to them than any words could
have done; she put on the dhaja
(a course red turban) and
broke her bracelets in pieces. By these acts
she became a dead
person in the eye of the law, and excluded from her caste forever.
By the iron rule of ancient custom, if she should now
choose to live she could never return to her family. Sleeman
was in deep trouble.
If she starved herself to death her family
would be disgraced; and, moreover, starving
would be a more
lingering misery than the death by fire. He went back in the
evening thoroughly worried. The old woman remained on her
rock, and there in the morning
he found her with her dhaja
still on her head. "She talked very collectedly, telling me
that she had
determined to mix her ashes with those of her
departed husband, and should patiently
wait my permission to
do so, assured that God would enable her to sustain life till
that was given, though she dared not eat or drink. Looking
at the sun, then rising
before her over a long and beautiful
reach of the river, she said calmly, 'My soul has
been for five
days with my husband's near that sun; nothing but my earthly
frame
is left; and this, I know, you will in time suffer to be
mixed with his ashes in yonder
pit, because it is not in your
nature or usage wantonly to prolong the miseries of a
poor old
woman.'"
He assured her that it was his desire and duty to save her,
and to urge her to live,
and to keep her family from the disgrace
of being thought her murderers. But she said she was
not afraid of their being
thought so; that they had all, like
good children, done everything in their power to
induce her to
live, and to abide with them; "and if I should consent I know
they
would love and honor me, but my duties to them have
now ended. I commit them all to your care, and I go to
attend my husband, Ummed Singh Upadhya, with whose ashes
on the funeral pile mine have been already three times mixed."
She believed that she and he had been upon the earth three
several times as wife and
husband, and that she had burned
herself to death three times upon his pyre. That is why
she
said that strange thing. Since she had broken her bracelets
and put on the red
turban she regarded herself as a corpse;
otherwise she would not have allowed herself to
do her husband
the irreverence of pronouncing his name. "This was the
first time in her long life
that she had ever uttered her husband's
name, for in India no woman, high or low, ever pronounces
the name of her husband."
Major Sleeman still tried to shake her purpose. He promised
to build her a fine house among the temples of her ancestors
upon the bank of the river and make handsome provision
for her out of rent-free
lands if she would consent to live; and
if she wouldn't he would allow no stone or brick
to ever mark
the place where she died. But she only smiled and said, "My
pulse has
long ceased to beat, my spirit has departed; I shall
suffer nothing in the burning; and
if you wish proof, order
some fire and you shall see this arm consumed without giving
me any pain."
Sleeman was now satisfied that he could not alter her
purpose. He sent for all the
chief members of the family and
said he would suffer her to burn herself if they would
enter
into a written engagement to abandon the suttee in their
family thenceforth.
They agreed; the papers were drawn out
and signed, and at noon, Saturday, word was sent
to the poor
old woman. She seemed greatly pleased. The ceremonies of
bathing were
gone through with, and by three o'clock she was
ready and the fire was briskly burning
in the pit. She had
now gone without food or drink during more than four days
and a half. She came ashore from her rock, first wetting her
sheet in the waters of
the sacred river, for without that safeguard
any shadow which might fall upon her would convey
impurity to her: then she walked
to the pit, leaning upon
one of her sons and a nephew—the distance was a
hundred
and fifty yards.
"I had sentries placed all around, and no other person was allowed to
approach within
five paces. She came on with a calm and cheerful countenance,
stopped once, and casting her eyes upwards, said, 'Why have they
kept me five days
from thee, my husband?' On coming to the sentries her
supporters stopped and remained
standing; she moved on, and walked once
around the pit, paused a moment, and while
muttering a prayer, threw some
flowers into the fire. She then walked up deliberately
and steadily to the
brink, stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning
back in the
midst as if reposing upon a couch, was consumed without uttering a shriek or
betraying one sign of agony."
It is fine and beautiful. It compels one's reverence and
respect—no, has it
freely, and without compulsion. We see
how the custom, once started, could continue, for
the soul of it
is that stupendous power, Faith; faith brought to the pitch of
effectiveness by the cumulative force of example and long use
and custom; but we cannot
understand how the first widows
came to take to it. That is a perplexing detail.
Sleeman says that it was usual to play music at the suttee,
but that the white man's
notion that this was to drown the
screams of the martyr is not correct; that it had a
quite different
purpose. It was believed that the martyr died prophecying;
that the prophecies sometimes foretold disaster, and it
was
considered a kindness to those upon whom it was to fall to
drown the voice and keep them
in ignorance of the misfortune
that was to come.
HE STOLE BLANKETS.
CHAPTER XLIX.
He had had much experience of physicians, and said "the only way to keep your
health
is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd
druther not."
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
was a long journey—two nights, one day, and part of
another day, from Bombay eastward to Allahabad; but it
was always interesting, and
it was not fatiguing. At first
the night travel promised to be fatiguing, but that was
on
account of pyjamas. This foolish night-dress consists of
jacket
and drawers. Sometimes they are made of silk, sometimes of
a raspy,
scratchy, slazy woolen material with a sandpaper surface.
The drawers are loose elephant-legged and elephant-waisted
things, and instead of buttoning around the body
there is a draw-string to produce
the required shrinkage. The
jacket is roomy, and one buttons it in front. Pyjamas are
hot
on a hot night and cold on a cold night—defects which a
nightshirt
is free from. I tried the pyjamas in order to be in
the fashion; but I was obliged to
give them up, I couldn't
stand them. There was no sufficient change from day-gear to
night-gear. I missed the refreshing and luxurious sense, induced
by the night-gown, of being undressed, emancipated, set
free from restraints and
trammels. In place of that, I had the
worried, confined, oppressed, suffocated sense of
being abed
with my clothes on. All through the warm half of the night
the coarse
surfaces irritated my skin and made it feel baked
and feverish, and the dreams which
came in the fitful flurries
of slumber were such as distress the sleep of the damned, or
ought to; and all through the cold other half of the night I
could get no time for
sleep because I had to employ it all in
stealing blankets. But blankets are of no value at such a
time; the higher they are piled the more effectively they
cork the cold in and keep it from getting out. The result is
that your legs are ice, and you know how you will feel by and
by when you are buried. In a sane interval I discarded the
pyjamas, and led a rational and comfortable life thenceforth.
Out in the country in India, the day begins early. One
sees a plain, perfectly flat,
dust-colored and brick-yardy, stretching
limitlessly away on every side in the dim gray light, striped
everywhere with
hard-beaten narrow paths, the vast flatness
broken at wide intervals by bunches of
spectral trees that
mark where villages are; and along all the paths are slender
women and the black forms of lanky naked men moving to
their work, the women with brass
water-jars on their heads,
the men carrying hoes. The man is not entirely naked;
always there is a bit of white rag, a loin-cloth; it amounts to
a bandage, and is a
white accent on his black person, like the
silver band around the middle of a pipe-stem.
Sometimes he
also wears a fluffy and voluminous white turban, and this adds
a
second accent. He then answers properly to Miss Gordon
Cumming's flash-light picture of
him—as a person who is
dressed in "a turban and a pocket handkerchief."
All day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead
levels and scattering bunches
of trees and mud villages. You
soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is
an enchantment
about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall.
You cannot tell just what it
is that makes the spell, perhaps,
but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless. Of
course, at bottom,
you know in a vague way that it is history; it is that
that affects you, a haunting sense of the
myriads of human
lives that have blossomed, and withered, and perished here,
repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century,
and age after age, the
barren and meaningless process; it is
this sense that gives to this forlorn, uncomely land power to
speak to the spirit and make friends with it; to speak to it
with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with melancholy.
The deserts of Australia and the ice-barrens of Greenland have
no speech, for they have no venerable history; with nothing
to tell of man and his vanities, his fleeting glories and his
miseries, they have nothing wherewith to spiritualize their
ugliness and veil it with a charm.
There is nothing pretty about an Indian village—a mud
one—and I
do not remember that we saw any but mud ones
on that long flight to Allahabad. It is a
little bunch of dirt-colored
mud hovels jammed together within a mud wall. As
a rule, the rains had beaten down
parts of some of the houses,
and this gave the village the aspect of a mouldering and
hoary
ruin. I believe the cattle and the vermin live inside the wall;
for I saw
cattle coming out and cattle going in; and whenever
I saw a villager, he was scratching.
This last is only circumstantial
evidence, but I think it has value. The village has a
battered little temple or
two, big enough to hold an idol, and
with custom enough to fat-up a priest and keep him
comfortable.
Where there are Mohammedans there are
generally a
few sorry tombs outside the village that have a decayed and
neglected
look. The villages interested me because of things
which Major Sleeman says about them
in his books—particularly
what he says about the division of labor in them. He
says that the whole face of
India is parceled out into estates of
villages; that nine-tenths of the vast population
of the land
consist of cultivators of the soil; that it is these cultivators
who
inhabit the villages; that there are certain "established"
village
servants—mechanics and others who are apparently
paid a wage by the village
at large, and whose callings remain
in certain families and are handed down from father
to son,
like an estate. He gives a list of these established servants:
Priest, blacksmith, carpenter, accountant, washerman, basket-maker,
potter, watchman, barber, shoemaker, brazier, confectioner,
weaver, dyer, etc. In his day witches
abounded, and it
was not thought good business wisdom for a man to marry
his
daughter into a family that hadn't a witch in it, for she
would need a witch on the
premises to protect her children
from the evil spells which would certainly be cast upon
them
by the witches connected with the neighboring families.
The office of midwife was hereditary in the family of the
basket-maker. It belonged to
his wife. She might not be
competent, but the office was hers, anyway. Her pay was not
high—25 cents for a boy, and half as much for a girl. The
girl was not
desired, because she would be a disastrous expense
by and by. As soon as she should be
old enough to begin to
wear clothes for propriety's sake, it would be a disgrace to the
family if she were not married; and to marry her meant financial
ruin; for by custom the father must spend upon feasting
and wedding-display
everything he had and all he could borrow
—in fact, reduce himself to a
condition of poverty which he
might never more recover from.
It was the dread of this prospective ruin which made the
killing of girl-babies so
prevalent in India in the old days
before England laid the iron hand of her prohibitions
upon the
piteous slaughter. One may judge of how prevalent the custom
was, by one of Sleeman's casual electrical remarks, when
he speaks of children at
play in villages—where girl-voices
were never heard!
The wedding-display folly is still in full force in India, and
by consequence the
destruction of girl-babies is still furtively
practiced; but not largely, because of the
vigilance of the
government and the sternness of the penalties it levies.
In some parts of India the village keeps in its pay three
other servants: an
astrologer to tell the villager when he may
plant his crop, or make a journey, or marry a wife, or strangle
a child, or borrow a dog, or climb a tree, or catch a rat, or
swindle a neighbor, without offending the alert and solicitous
heavens; and what his dream means, if he has had one and
was not bright enough to interpret it himself by the details of
his dinner; the two other established servants were the tiger-persuader
and the hailstorm discourager. The one kept away
the tigers if he could, and collected the wages anyway, and
the other kept off the hailstorms, or explained why he failed.
He charged the same for explaining a failure that he did for
scoring a success. A man is an idiot who can't earn a living in
India.
A STREET SPRINKLER.
Major Sleeman reveals the fact that the trade union and
the boycott are antiquities in
India. India seems to have
originated everything. The
"sweeper" belongs to the
bottom
caste; he is the lowest of
the low—all other castes
despise him
and scorn his office.
But that does not trouble him.
His caste is a caste, and
that
is sufficient for him, and so he
is proud of it, not ashamed.
Sleeman
says:
"It is perhaps not known to many
of my countrymen, even in India, that
in every
town and city in the country
the right of sweeping the houses and
streets is a
monopoly, and is supported
entirely by the pride of castes among
the scavengers,
who are all of the lowest
class. The right of sweeping within a certain range is recognized by the
caste to
belong to a certain member; and if any other member presumes to
sweep within that range,
he is excommunicated—no other member will
smoke out of his pipe or drink out
of his jug; and he can get restored to
caste only by a feast to the whole body of
sweepers. If any housekeeper
within a particular circle happens to offend the sweeper of
that range, none of
his filth will be removed till he pacities him, because no other sweeper will
dare to touch it; and the people of a town are often more tyrannized over by
these people than by any other."
A footnote by Major Sleeman's editor, Mr. Vincent Arthur
Smith, says that in our day
this tyranny of the sweepers' guild
is one of the many difficulties which bar the
progress of Indian
sanitary reform. Think of this:
"The sweepers cannot be readily cocreed, because no Hindoo or Mussulman
would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute himself by
beating the
refractory seavenger."
They certainly do seem to have the whip-hand; it would
be difficult to imagine a more
impregnable position. "The
vested rights described in the text are so fully recognized
in
practice that they are frequently the subject of sale or mortgage."
Just like a milk-route; or like a London crossing-sweepership.
It is said that the
London crossing-sweeper's right to his crossing
is recognized by the rest of the guild; that they protect
him in its possession;
that certain choice crossings
are valuable property, and are saleable at
high figures. I have noticed that the
man who
sweeps in front of the Army and Navy Stores
has a wealthy South African
aristocratic style
about him; and when he is off his guard, he has
exactly that
look on his face which you always
see in the face of a man who has is saving
up
his daughter to marry her to a duke.
A SOUTH AFRICAN STYLE.
It appears from Sleeman that in India the occupation of
elephant-driver is confined to
Mohammedans. I wonder why
that is. The water-carrier (bheestie) is a Mohammedan, but
it is said that the reason of that is,
that the Hindoo's religion
does not allow him to touch the skin of dead kine, and that
is what the water-sack is made of; it would defile him.
And it doesn't allow him
to eat meat; the animal that furnished
the meat was murdered, and to take any creature's life
is a sin. It is a good and
gentle religion, but inconvenient.
A great Indian river, at low water, suggests the familiar
anatomical picture of a
skinned human body, the intricate
mesh of interwoven muscles and tendons to stand for
water-channels,
and the archipelagoes of fat and
flesh inclosed by
them to stand for the sandbars. Somewhere on this journey
we
passed such a river, and on a later journey we saw in the
Sutlej the duplicate of that
river. Curious rivers they are;
low shores a dizzy distance apart, with nothing between
but an
enormous acreage of sand-flats with sluggish little veins of
water
dribbling around amongst them; Saharas of sand, smallpox-pitted
with footprints punctured in belts as straight as the
equator clear from the one
shore to the other (barring the
channel-interruptions)—a
dry-shod ferry, you see. Long railway
bridges are required for this sort of rivers, and India has
them. You approach
Allahabad by a very long one. It was
now carrying us across the bed of the Jumna, a bed
which did
not seem to have been slept in for one while or more. It
wasn't all
river-bed—most of it was overflow ground.
Allahabad means "City of God." I get this from the
books. From a printed
curiosity—a letter written by one of
those brave and confident Hindoo
strugglers with the English
tongue, called a "babu"—I got a more compressed
translation:
"Godville." It is perfectly correct, but
that is the most
that can be said for it.
We arrived in the forenoon, and short-handed; for Satan
got left behind somewhere that
morning, and did not overtake
us until after nightfall. It seemed very peaceful without
him.
The world seemed asleep and dreaming.
I did not see the native town, I think. I do not remember
why; for an incident
connects it with the Great Mutiny, and
that is enough to make any place interesting. But
I saw the
English part of the city. It is a town of wide avenues and
noble distances, and is comely and alluring, and full of suggestions
of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a
good conscience buttressed by
a sufficient bank account gives.
The bungalows (dwellings) stand well
back in the seclusion
and privacy of large enclosed compounds (private grounds,
as
we should say) and in the shade and shelter of trees. Even
the
photographer and the prosperous merchant ply their industries
in the elegant reserve of big compounds, and the citizens
drive in there upon
their business occasions. And not in cabs—
no; in the Indian cities cabs are
for the drifting stranger; all the
white citizens have private carriages; and each
carriage has a
flock of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it.
The
vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm, and
makes the lecturer feel like an
opera. India has many names,
and they are correctly descriptive. It is the Land of Contradictions,
the Land of Subtlety and Superstition,
the Land of
Wealth and Poverty, the Land of Splendor and Desolation, the
Land of
Plague and Famine, the Land of the Thug and the
Poisoner, and of the Meek and the
Patient, the Land of the
Suttee, the Land of the Unreinstatable Widow, the Land where
All Life is Holy, the Land of Cremation, the Land where the
Vulture is a Grave and
a Monument, the Land of the Multitudinous
Gods; and if signs go for anything, it is the Land
of the Private Carriage.
In Bombay the forewoman of a millinery shop came to the
hotel in her private carriage
to take the measure for a gown—
not for me, but for another. She had come out
to India to
make a temporary stay, but was extending it indefinitely; indeed,
she was purposing to end her days there. In London, she
said, her work had been hard, her hours long; for economy's
sake she had had to
live in shabby rooms and far away from
the shop, watch the pennies, deny herself many of
the common
comforts of life, restrict herself in effect to its bare necessities,
eschew cabs, travel third-class by underground train to and
from her work, swallowing coal-smoke and cinders all the way,
and sometimes troubled with the society of men and women
who were less desirable than the smoke and the cinders. But
in Bombay, on almost any kind of wages, she could live in
comfort, and keep her carriage, and have six servants in place
of the woman-of-all-work she had had in her English home.
Later, in Calcutta, I found that the Standard Oil clerks had
small one-horse vehicles, and did no walking; and I was told
that the clerks of the other large concerns there had the like
equipment. But to return to Allahabad.
I was up at dawn, the next morning. In India the tourist's
servant does not sleep in a
room in the hotel, but rolls himself
up head and ears in his blanket and stretches
himself on the
veranda, across the front of his master's door, and spends the
night there. I don't believe anybody's servant occupies a
room. Apparently, the bungalow
servants sleep on the
veranda; it is roomy, and goes all around the house. I speak
of men-servants; I saw none of the other sex. I think there
are none, except
child-nurses. I was up at dawn, and walked
around the veranda, past the rows of
sleepers. In front of one
door a Hindoo servant was squatting, waiting for his master to
call him. He had polished the yellow shoes and placed them
by the door, and now he
had nothing to do but wait. It was
freezing cold, but there he was, as motionless as a
sculptured
image, and as patient. It troubled me. I wanted to say to
him, Don't
crouch there like that and freeze; nobody requires
it of you; stir around and get warm."
But I hadn't the
words. I thought of saying jeldy jow, but I
couldn't remember
what it meant, so I didn't say it. I knew another phrase,
but it wouldn't come to
my mind. I moved on, purposing to
dismiss him from my thoughts, but his bare legs and
bare feet
kept him there. They kept drawing me back from the sunny
side to a point whence I could see him. At the end of an
hour he had not changed his attitude in the least degree. It
was a curious and impressive exhibition of meekness and
patience, or fortitude or indifference, I did not know which.
But it worried me, and it was spoiling my morning. In fact,
it spoiled two hours of it quite thoroughly. I quitted this
vicinity, then, and left him to punish himself as much as he
might want to. But up to that time the man had not changed
his attitude a hair. He will always remain with me, I suppose;
his figure never grows vague in my memory. Whenever I
read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs,
hardships, and misfortunes, he comes before me. He becomes
a personification, and stands for India in trouble. And for
untold ages India in trouble has been pursued with the very
remark which I was going to utter but didn't, because its
meaning had slipped me: Jeldy jow! ("Come, shove along!")
Why, it was the very thing.
"IT WORRIED ME"
In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the
Fort. Part of the way was beautiful. It led under stately
trees and through groups of native houses and by the usual
village well, where the picturesque gangs are always flocking
to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time brawny
men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water,
and making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for
the sun was already transacting business, firing India up for
the day. There was plenty of this early bathing going on, for
it was getting toward breakfast time, and with an unpurified
body the Hindoo must not eat.
Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads
crowded with pilgrims of both
sexes, for one of the great
religious fairs of India was being held, just beyond the
Fort,
at the junction of the sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna.
Three sacred
rivers, I should have said, for there is a subterranean
one. Nobody has seen it, but that doesn't signify.
The fact that it is there is
enough. These pilgrims had come
from all over India; some of them had been months on the
way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn,
poor, hungry, but
supported and sustained by an unwavering
faith and belief; they were supremely happy and
content,
now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand; they were
going to be
cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption
by these holy waters which make
utterly pure whatsoever thing
they touch, even the dead and rotten. It is wonderful, the
power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon
multitudes of the old
and weak and the young and frail enter
without hesitation or complaint upon such
incredible journeys
and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done
in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No
matter what the impulse
is, the act born of it is beyond imagination
marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.
There are choice great natures
among us that could exhibit
the equivalent of this prodigious self-sacrifice, but the rest of
us know that we should not be equal to anything approaching
it. Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope
that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.
Two millions of natives arrive at this fair every year.
How many start, and die on the
road, from age and fatigue
and disease and scanty nourishment, and how many die on the
return, from the same causes, no one knows; but the tale is
great, one may say
enormous. Every twelfth year is held to
be a year of peculiar grace; a greatly augmented
volume of
pilgrims results then. The twelfth year has held this distinction
since the remotest times, it is said. It is said also that
there is to be but one
more twelfth year—for the Ganges.
After that, that holiest of all sacred
rivers will cease to be
holy, and will be abandoned by the pilgrim for many centuries;
how many, the wise men have not stated. At the end of that
interval it will become
holy again. Meantime, the data will
be arranged by those people who have charge of all
such matters,
the great chief Brahmins. It will be like
shutting down
a mint. At a first glance it looks most unbrahminically uncommercial,
but I am not disturbed, being soothed and
tranquilized
by their reputation. "Brer fox he lay low," as Uncle
Remus says; and at the
judicious time he will spring something
on the Indian public which will show that he was not
financially asleep when he
took the Ganges out of the market.
Great numbers of the natives along the roads were bringing
away holy water from the
rivers. They would carry it far
and wide in India and sell it. Tavernier, the French
traveler
(17th century), notes that Ganges water is often given at
weddings,
"each guest receiving a cup or two, according to
the
liberality of the host; sometimes 2,000 or 3,000 rupees' worth
of it is
consumed at a wedding."
The Fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large
RELIGIOUS FAIR AT ALLAHABAD.
experience in religions. In its great court stands a monolith
which was placed there more than 2,000 years ago to preach
Budhism by its pious inscription; the Fort was built three
centuries ago by a Mohammedan Emperor—a resanctification
of the place in the interest of that religion. There is a Hindoo
temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with
shrines and idols; and now the Fort belongs to the English, it
contains a Christian Church. Insured in all the companies.
From the lofty ramparts one has a fine view of the sacred
rivers. They join at that
point—the pale blue Jumna, apparently
clean and clear, and the muddy Ganges, dull yellow
and not clean. On a long curved
spit between the rivers, towns
of tents were visible, with a multitude of fluttering
pennons, and
a mighty swarm of pilgrims. It was a troublesome place to
get down
to, and not a quiet place when you arrived; but it
was interesting. There was a world of
activity and turmoil and
noise, partly religious, partly commercial; for the Mohammedans
were there to curse and sell, and the Hindoos to buy and
pray. It is a fair as
well as a religious festival. Crowds were
bathing, praying, and drinking the purifying
waters, and many
sick pilgrims had come long journeys in palanquins to be
healed
of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not be,
then to die on the blessed banks
and so make sure of heaven.
There were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over
with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung;
for the cow is holy
and so is the rest of it; so holy that
the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his
hut with this
refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the
gracing of his dirt floor. There were seated families, fearfully
and wonderfully
painted, who by attitude and grouping represented
the families of certain great gods. There was a holy
man who sat naked by the day
and by the week on a cluster of
iron spikes, and did not seem to mind it; and another
holy
man, who stood all day holding his withered arms motionless
aloft, and was said to have been doing it for years. All of
these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for
the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the
people give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed
to him. At last came a procession of naked holy people
marching by and chanting, and I wrenched myself away.
CHAPTER L.
The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a
fig-leaf.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied
but a few hours. It was admirably dusty. The
dust settled upon you in a thick ashy
layer and turned
you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the
cow
manure and the sense of holiness. There was a change of
cars about mid-afternoon at
Moghul-serai—if that was the
name—and a wait of two hours there
for the Benares train.
We could have found a carriage and driven to the sacred city,
but we should have lost the wait. In other countries a long
wait at a station is a
dull thing and tedious, but one has no
right to have that feeling in India. You have the
monster
crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion,
the
shifting splendors of the costumes—dear me, the delight
of it, the charm of
it are beyond speech. The two-hour wait
was over too soon. Among other satisfying things
to look at
was a minor native prince from the backwoods somewhere,
with his guard
of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy
gang of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty
flint-lock
muskets. The general show came so near to exhausting
variety that one
would have said that no addition to it could
be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and
his motleys marched
through it one saw that that seeming impossibility had happened.
We got away by and by, and soon reached the outer edge
of Benares; then there was
another wait; but, as usual, with
something to look at. This was a cluster of little canvasboxes—palanquins.
A canvas-box is not much of a sight—
when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an object of
interest. These boxes were grouped apart, in the full blaze of
the terrible sun during the three-quarters of an hour that we
tarried there. They contained zenana ladies. The had to sit
up; there was not room enough to stretch out. They probably
did not mind it. They are used to the close captivity of
their dwellings all their lives; when they go a journey they
are carried to the train in these boxes; in the train they have
to be secluded from inspection. Many people pity them, and
I always did it myself and never charged anything; but it is
doubtful if this compassion is valued. While we were in India
some good-hearted Europeans in one of the cities proposed to
restrict a large park to the use of zenana ladies, so that they
could go there and in assured privacy go about unveiled and
enjoy the sunshine and air as they had never enjoyed them
before. The good intentions back of the proposition were
recognized, and sincere thanks returned for it, but the proposition
itself met with a prompt declination at the hands of
those who were authorized to speak for the zenana ladies.
Apparently, the idea was shocking to the ladies—indeed, it
was quite manifestly shocking. Was that proposition the
equivalent of inviting European ladies to assemble scantily
and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park?
It seemed to be about that.
Without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling;
and without doubt the
person whose rule of modesty has been
trangressed feels the same sort of wound that he
would feel if
something made holy to him by his religion had suffered a
desecration. I say "rule of modesty" because there are about
a million rules in the
world, and this makes a million standards
to be looked out for. Major Sleeman mentions
the case of some
high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when
some English young ladies passed by with faces bare to the
world; so scandalized that they spoke out with strong indignation
and wondered that people could be so shameless as to
expose their persons like that. And yet "the legs of the
objectors were naked to mid-thigh." Both parties were clean-minded
and irreproachably modest, while abiding by their
separate rules, but they couldn't have traded rules for a change
without suffering considerable discomfort. All human rules
are more or less idiotic, I suppose. It is best so, no doubt.
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but
if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building
materials.
You have a long drive through the outskirts of Benares
before you get to the hotel.
And all the aspects are melancholy.
It is a vision of
dusty sterility, decaying temples,
crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby huts. The
whole
region seems to ache with age and penury. It must take ten
thousand years of
want to produce such an aspect. We were
still outside of the great native city when we
reached the hotel.
It was a quiet and homelike house, inviting, and manifestly
comfortable. But we liked its annex better, and went thither.
It was a mile away,
perhaps, and stood in the midst of a large
compound, and was built bungalow fashion,
everything on the
ground floor, and a veranda all around. They have doors in
India, but I don't know why. They don't fasten, and they
stand open, as a rule, with a
curtain hanging in the doorspace
to keep out the glare of the sun. Still, there is
plenty of privacy,
for no white person will come in without
notice, of course.
The native men servants will, but they don't seem to count.
They glide in, barefoot and noiseless, and are in the midst before
one knows it. At first this is a shock, and sometimes it
is an embarrassment; but
one has to get used to it, and does.
There was one tree in the compound, and a monkey lived
in it. At first I was strongly
interested in the tree, for I was
told that it was the renowned peepul—the tree in whose
shadow you cannot tell a lie. This one failed
to stand the test,
and I went away from it disappointed. There was a softly
creaking well close by, and a couple of oxen drew water from
it by the hour,
superintended by two natives dressed in the
usual "turban and pocket-handkerchief." The
tree and the
well were the only scenery, and so the compound was a soothing
and lonesome and satisfying place; and very restful after
so many activities.
There was nobody in our bungalow but
ourselves; the other guests were in the next one,
where the
table d'hote was furnished. A body could not be more pleasantly
situated. Each room had the customary bath attached—
a room ten or
twelve feet square, with a roomy stone-paved
pit in it and abundance of water. One could
not easily
improve upon this arrangement, except by furnishing it with
cold water
and excluding the hot, in deference to the fervency
of the climate; but that is
forbidden. It would damage the
bather's health. The stranger is warned against taking
cold
baths in India, but even the most intelligent strangers are
fools, and they
do not obey, and so they presently get laid up.
I was the most intelligent fool that
passed through, that year.
But I am still more intelligent now. Now that it is too late.
I wonder if the dorian, if that is the name of it, is another
superstition, like the peepul tree. There was a great abundance
and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never
in evidence. It was never
the season for the dorian. It was
always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other,
but it
never did. By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and
incomparably
delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. Its
rind was said to exude a stench of so
atrocious a nature that
when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat
was a refreshment. We found many who had eaten the
dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture. They
said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in
your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot
that would make you oblivious to
the smell of the rind, but that if
your grip slipped and you caught
the smell of the rind before the
fruit was in your mouth, you
would faint. There is a fortune
in that rind. Some day
somebody will import it into
Europe and sell it for cheese.
THEY SPOKE OF IT WITH RAPTURE.
Benares was not a disappointment.
It justified its
reputation as a curiosity. It
is on high ground, and overhangs
a grand curve of the
Ganges. It is a vast mass of
building, compactly
crusting
a hill, and is cloven in all
directions by an intricate
confusion
of cracks which
stand for streets. Tall, slim
minarets and beflagged temple-spires
rise out of it and
give it picturesqueness,
viewed from the river. The city
is as busy as an ant-hill, and
the hurly-burly of human life swarming along the web of
narrow streets reminds one of the ants. The sacred cow
swarms along, too, and goes
whither she pleases, and takes
toll of the grain-shops, and is very much in the way, and
is a
good deal of a nuisance, since she must not be molested.
Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older
even than legend, and looks
twice as old as all of them put
together. From a Hindoo statement quoted in Rev. Mr.
Parker's compact and lucid Guide to Benares, I find that the
site of the town was
the beginning-place of the Creation. It
was merely an upright "lingam," at first, no
larger than a
stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean. This
was
the work of the God Vishnu. Later he spread the lingam
out till its surface was ten
miles across. Still it was not large
enough for the business; therefore he presently
built the
globe around it. Benares is thus the center of the earth.
This is
considered an advantage.
It has had a tumultuous history, both materially and spiritually.
It started Brahminically, many ages ago; then by and
by Buddha
came in recent times 2,500 years ago, and after
that it was Buddhist during many
centuries—twelve, perhaps—but
the Brahmins got the upper hand again, then, and
have held it ever since. It is
unspeakably sacred in Hindoo
eyes, and is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like
the
rind of the dorian. It is the headquarters of the Brahmin
faith, and
one-eighth of the population are priests of that
church. But it is not an overstock, for
they have all India as
a prey. All India flocks thither on pilgrimage, and pours its
savings into the pockets of the priests in a generous stream,
which never fails. A
priest with a good stand on the shore of
the Ganges is much better off than the sweeper
of the best crossing
in London. A good stand is worth a world of money.
The holy proprietor of it sits
under his grand spectacular
umbrella and blesses people all his life, and collects his
commission,
and grows fat and rich; and the stand passes
from
father to son, down and down and down through the ages,
and remains a
permanent and lucrative estate in the family.
As Mr. Parker suggests, it can become a
subject of dispute, at
one time or another, and then the matter will be settled, not
by prayer and fasting and consultations with Vishnu, but by
the intervention of a much more puissant power—an English
court. In Bombay I was told by an American missionary
that in India there are 640 Protestant missionaries at work.
At first it seemed an immense force, but of course that was a
thoughtless idea. One missionary to 500,000 natives—no,
that is not a force; it is the reverse of it; 640 marching
against an intrenched camp of 300,000,000—the odds are too
great. A force of 640 in Benares alone would have its hands
over-full with 8,000 Brahmin priests for adversary. Missionaries
need to be well equipped with hope and confidence, and
this equipment they seem to have always had in all parts of
the world. Mr. Parker has it. It enables him to get a favorable
outlook out of statistics which might add up differently
with other mathematicians. For instance:
"During the past few years competent observers declare
that the number of pilgrims to
Benares has increased."
And then he adds up this fact and gets this conclusion:
"But the revival, if so it may be called, has in it the marks
of death. It is a
spasmodic struggle before dissolution."
In this world we have seen the Roman Catholic power
dying, upon these same terms, for
many centuries. Many a
time we have gotten all ready for the funeral and found it
postponed again, on account of the weather or something.
Taught by experience, we ought
not to put on our things for
this Brahminical one till we see the procession move. Apparently
one of the most uncertain things in the world is the
funeral of a religion.
I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of
Hindoo theology, but the
difficulties were too great, the matter
was too intricate. Even the mere A, B, C of it
is baffling.
There is a trinity—Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu—independent
powers, apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that,
because in one of the temples there is an image where an
attempt has been made to concentrate the three in one person.
The three have other names and plenty of them, and this
makes confusion in one's mind. The three have wives and the
wives have several names, and this increases the confusion.
There are children, the children have many names, and thus
the confusion goes on and on. It is not worth while to try to
get any grip upon the cloud of minor gods, there are too many
of them.
It is even a justifiable economy to leave Brahma, the
chiefest god of all, out of your
studies, for he seems to cut no
great figure in India. The vast bulk of the national
worship
is lavished upon Shiva and Vishnu and their families. Shiva's
symbol—the "lingam" with which Vishnu began the Creation—is
worshiped by everybody, apparently. It is the commonest
object in Benares. It is on view everywhere, it is
garlanded with flowers,
offerings are made to it, it suffers no
neglect. Commonly it is an upright stone, shaped
like a
thimble—sometimes like an elongated thimble. This priapus-worship,
then, is older than history. Mr. Parker
says that the
lingams in Benares "outnumber the inhabitants."
In Benares there are many Mohammedan mosques. There
are Hindoo temples without
number—these quaintly shaped
and elaborately sculptured little stone jugs
crowd all the lanes.
The Ganges itself and every individual drop of water in it are
temples. Religion, then, is the business of Benares, just as
gold-production is the business of Johannesburg. Other industries
count for nothing as compared with the vast and all-absorbing
rush and drive and boom of the town's specialty. Benares
is the sacredest of sacred cities. The moment you step
across the sharply-defined
line which separates it from the rest
of the globe, you stand upon ineffably and unspeakably holy
ground. Mr. Parker says: "It is impossible to convey any
adequate idea of the intense feelings of veneration and affection
with which the pious Hindoo regards 'Holy Kashi'
(Benares)." And then he gives you this vivid and moving picture:
"Let a Hindoo regiment be marched through the district, and as soon as
they cross the
line and enter the limits of the holy place they rend the air with
cries of 'Kashi ji ki
jai—jai—jai! (Holy Kashi! Hail to thee! Hail!
Hail!
Hail)'. The weary pilgrim scarcely able to stand, with age and weakness,
blinded by the dust and heat, and almost dead with fatigue, crawls out
of the oven-like railway carriage and as soon as his feet touch the ground he
lifts up his withered hands and utters the same pious exclamation. Let a
European in
some distant city in casual talk in the bazar mention the fact that
he has lived at
Benares, and at once voices will be raised to call down blessings
on his head, for a dweller in Benares is of all men most blessed."
It makes our own religious enthusiasm seem pale and cold.
Inasmuch as the life of
religion is in the heart, not the head,
Mr. Parker's touching picture seems to promise a
sort of indefinite
postponement of that funeral.
CHAPTER LI.
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or
its
songs either.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
, the city of Benares is in effect just a big church, a
religious hive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or
a mosque, and whose every
conceivable earthly and
heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to
speak—a
sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked.
I will make out a little itinerary for the pilgrim; then you
will see how handy the
system is, how convenient, how comprehensive.
If you
go to Benares with a serious desire to spiritually
benefit yourself, you will find it valuable. I got some
of the facts from
conversations with the Rev. Mr. Parker and
the others from his Guide to Benares; they
are therefore trustworthy.
1. Purification. At sunrise you must go down to the
Ganges and
bathe, pray, and drink some of the water. This is
for your general purification.
2. Protection against Hunger. Next, you must fortify
yourself
against the sorrowful earthly ill just named. This
you will do by worshiping for a
moment in the Cow Temple.
By the door of it you will find an image of Ganesh, son of
Shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; its
face and hands are of
silver. You will worship it a little, and
pass on, into a covered veranda, where you
will find devotees
reciting from the sacred books, with the help of instructors.
In this place are groups of rude and dismal idols. You may
contribute something for
their support; then pass into the temple,
a grim and stenchy place, for it is populous with sacred
cows and with beggars. You will give something to the beggars,
and "reverently kiss the tails" of such cows as pass along,
for these cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will
secure you from hunger for the day.
DO IT REVERENTLY.
3. "The Poor Man's Friend." You will next worship
this god. He
is at the bottom of a stone cistern in the temple
of Dalbhyeswar, under the shade of a
noble peepul tree on the
bluff overlooking the Ganges, so you must go back to the
river. The Poor Man's Friend is the god of material prosperity
in general, and the god of the rain in particular. You
will
secure material prosperiy, tor both, by worshiping him.
He is Shiva, under a new alias,
and he abides in the bottom
of that cistern, in the form of a stone lingam. You pour
Ganges water over him, and in return for this homage you
get the promised
benefits. If there is any delay about the
rain, you must pour water in until the cistern
is full; the rain
will then be sure to come.
4. Fever. At the Kedar Ghat you will find a long flight
of
stone steps leading down to the river. Half way down is a
tank filled with sewage. Drink
as much of it as you want. It
is for fever.
5. Smallpox. Go straight from there to the central Ghat.
At its
upstream end you will find a small whitewashed building,
which is a temple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox.
Her under-study is
there—a rude human figure behind a brass
screen. You will worship this for
reasons to be furnished
presently.
6. The Well of Fate. For certain reasons you will next
go and
do homage at this well. You will find it in the Dandpan
Temple, in the city. The sunlight falls into it from a
square hole in the masonry
above. You will approach it with
awe, for your life is now at stake. You will bend over
and
look. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured
in the water far down in the well. If matters have been
otherwise ordered, a
sudden cloud will mask the sun and you
will see nothing. This means that you have not
six months to
live. If you are already at the point of death, your circumstances
are now serious. There is no time to lose. Let this
world go, arrange for the next
one. Handily situated, at
your very elbow, is opportunity for this. You turn and worship
the image of Maha Kal, the Great Fate, and happiness in
the life to come is
secured. If there is breath in your body
yet, you should now make an effort to get a
further lease of
the present life. You have a chance. There is a chance for
everything in this admirably stocked and wonderfully systemized
Spiritual and Temporal Army and Navy Store. You
must get yourself carried to the
7. Well of Long Life. This is within the precincts of the
mouldering and venerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of
the oldest in Benares. You
pass in by a stone image of the
monkey god, Hanuman, and there, among the ruined courtyards,
you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage.
It
smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the
washings of
rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it;
THE WELL OF FATE.
bathe in it gratefully and worshipfully, for this is the Fountain
of Youth; these are the Waters of Long Life. Your
gray hairs will disappear, and with them your wrinkles and
your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness of age,
and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagerness
for the new race of life. Now will come flooding upon
you the manifold desires that haunt the dear dreams of the
morning of life. You will go whither you will find
8. Fulfillment of Desire. To wit, to the Kameshwar
Temple,
sacred to Shiva as the Lord of Desires. Arrange for
yours there. And if you like to look
at idols among the pack
and jam of temples, there you will find enough to stock a
museum. You will begin to commit sins now with a fresh,
new vivacity; therefore, it will
be well to go frequently to a
place where you can get
9. Temporary Cleansing from Sin. To wit, to the Well
of the
Earring. You must approach this with the profoundest
reverence, for it is unutterably
sacred. It is, indeed, the most
sacred place in Benares, the very Holy of Holies, in the
estimation
of the people. It is a railed tank, with stone stairways
leading down to the
water. The water is not clean. Of
course it could not be, for people are always bathing
in it.
As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files
of sinners
descending and ascending—descending soiled with
sin, ascending purged from
it. "The liar, the thief, the murderer,
and the adulterer
may here wash and be clean," says
the Rev. Mr. Parker, in his book. Very well. I know
Mr.
Parker, and I believe it; but if anybody else had said it, I
should consider
him a person who had better go down in the
tank and take another wash. The god Vishnu
dug this tank.
He had nothing to dig with but his "discus." I do not know
what a
discus is, but I know it is a poor thing to dig tanks
with, because, by the time this
one was finished, it was full of
sweat—Vishnu's sweat. He constructed the site that
Benares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it,
and thought nothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little
thing like this tank. One of these statements is doubtful. I
do not know which one it is, but I think it difficult not to
believe that a god who could build a world around Benares
would not be intelligent enough to build it around the tank
too, and not have to dig it. Youth, long life, temporary purification
from sin, salvation through propitiation of the Great
Fate—these are all good. But you must do something more.
You must
10. Make Salvation Sure. There are several ways. To
get drowned
in the Ganges is one, but that is not pleasant.
To die within the limits of Benares is
another; but that is a
risky one, because you might be out of town when your time
came. The best one of all is the Pilgrimage Around the City.
You must walk; also, you
must go barefoot. The tramp is
forty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country
a
piece, and you will be marching five or six days. But you
will have plenty of
company. You will move with throngs
and hosts of happy pilgrims whose radiant costumes
will
make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songs and holy
pæans
of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your
spirit; and at intervals there will
be temples where you may
sleep and be refreshed with food. The pilgrimage completed,
you have purchased salvation, and paid for it. But you may
not get it unless you
11. Get Your Redemption Recorded. You can get this
done at the
Sakhi Binayak Temple, and it is best to do it, for
otherwise you might not be able to
prove that you had made
the pilgrimage in case the matter should some day come to be
disputed. That temple is in a lane back of the Cow Temple.
Over the door is a red
image of Ganesh of the elephant head,
son and heir of Shiva, and Prince of Wales to the Theological
Monarchy, so to speak. Within is a god whose office it is to
record your pilgrimage and be responsible for you. You will
not see him, but you will see a Brahmin who will attend to the
matter and take the money. If he should forget to collect the
money, you can remind him. He knows that your salvation
is now secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself.
You have nothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the
12. Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It is close to
the
Golden Temple. There you will see, sculptured out of a
single piece of black marble, a
bull which is much larger than
any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good
likeness
after all. And there also you will see a very uncommon
thing—an image
of Shiva. You have seen his lingam fifty
thousand times already, but this is Shiva
himself, and said to
be a good likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in
the firm that has three. "The well is covered by a fine
canopy of stone supported by
forty pillars," and around it you
will find what you have already seen at almost every
shrine
you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and eager pilgrims.
The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it
comes to
them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that
they are saved; and you can see by
their faces that there is
one happiness in this world which is supreme, and to which no
other joy is comparable. You receive your water, you make
your deposit, and now
what more would you have? Gold,
diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these
things
have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to
give you now.
For you it is bankrupt.
I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in
the order and sequence
above charted out in this Itinerary of
mine, but I think logic suggests that they ought
to do so.
Instead of a helter-skelter worship, we then have a definite
starting-place, and a march which carries the pilgrim steadily
forward by reasoned and logical progression to a definite goal.
Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him an
appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. It is
now business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise
in his mind, and he goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol;
this insures the prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which
gives him a fever. Then he drinks the sewage at the Kedar
Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever but gives him the
smallpox. He wishes to know how it is going to turn out; he
goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well. A
clouded sun shows him that death is near. Logically his best
course for the present, since he cannot tell at what moment he
may die, is to secure a happy hereafter; this he does, through
the agency of the Great Fate. He is safe, now, for heaven;
his next move will naturally be to keep out of it as long as he
can. Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple and secures
Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which
would kill a microbe. Logically, Youth has re-equipped him
for sin and with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally
go to the fane which is consecrated to the Fulfillment of
Desires, and make arrangements. Logically, he will now go
to the Well of the Earring from time to time to unload and
freshen up for further banned enjoyments. But first and last
and all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective
intervals he will always be speculating in "futures." He will
make the Great Pilgrimage around the city and so make his
salvation absolutely sure; he will also have record made of it,
so that it may remain absolutely sure and not be forgotten or
repudiated in the confusion of the Final Settlement. Logically,
also, he will wish to have satisfying and tranquilizing
personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; therefore he
goes to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation, adds that
completing detail, and then goes about his affairs serene and
content; serene and content, for he is now royally endowed
with an advantage which no religion in this world could give
him but his own; for henceforth he may commit as many million
sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it.
Thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat,
compact, clearly defined,
and covers the whole ground. I
desire to recommend it to such as find the other systems
too
difficult, exacting, and irksome for the uses of this fretful brief
life of
ours.
However, let me not deceive any one. My Itinerary lacks
a detail. I must put it in.
The truth is, that after the pilgrim
has faithfully followed the requirements of the Itinerary
through to the end and
has secured his salvation and also the
personal knowledge of that fact, there is still
an accident possible
to him which can annul the whole thing. If he should
ever cross to the other side
of the Ganges and get caught out
and die there he would at once come to life again in
the form
CONSIDERING THE MATTER.
of an ass. Think of that, after all this trouble and expense.You see how capricious and uncertain salvation is there. The
Hindoo has a childish and unreasoning aversion to being
turned into an ass. It is hard to tell why. One could properly
expect an ass to have an aversion to being turned into a
Hindoo. One could understand that he could lose dignity by
it; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence. But
the Hindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless
you count his religion. And he would gain much—release
from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million
priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli; he
would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also escape the
Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo
ought to consider; then he would go over and die on the other
side.
Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological
forces have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering
and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and
smoking for ages. But a little
group of missionaries have
taken post at its base, and they have hopes. There are the
Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the
London Missionary
Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society,
and the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission. They
have
schools, and the principal work seems to be among the
children. And no doubt
that part of the work prospers best,
for grown people everywhere are always likely to
cling to the
religion they were brought up in.
BENARES.
CHAPTER LII.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
mdash;Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working
for salvation in a curious way. He had a huge wad of
clay beside him and was making it
up into little wee gods
no bigger than carpet tacks. He stuck a grain of rice into
eachmdash;to represent the lingam, I think. He turned them out
nimbly, for he had had
long practice and had acquired great
facility. Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw
them into
the holy Ganges. This act of homage brought him the profound
homage of the piousmdash;also their coppers. He had a sure
living here, and was
earning a high place in the hereafter.
The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares.
Its tall bluffs are solidly
caked from water to summit, along a
stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of
massive and
picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of
stone
platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces
mdash;nowhere a break,
nowhere a glimpse of the bluff itself; all
the long face of it is compactly walled from
sight by this
crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured
temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances;
and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere,
and
brilliantly costumedmdash;streaming in rainbows up and
down the lofty stairways, and
massed in metaphorical flower-gardens
on the miles of great platforms at the river's edge.
All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety.
The palaces were built by
native princes whose homes, as a
rule, are far from Benares, but who go there from time to time
to refresh their souls with the sight and touch of the Ganges, the
river of their idolatry. The stairways are records of acts of
piety; the crowd of costly little temples are tokens of money
spent by rich men for present credit and hope of future reward.
Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sums
upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the
rich Hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is
seemingly non-existent. With us the poor spend money on
their religion, but they keep back some to live on. Apparently,
in India, the poor bankrupt themselves daily for their
religion. The rich Hindoo can afford his pious outlays; he
gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a sufficiency
of his income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo is
entitled to compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet
get him no glory.
We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in
chairs under an awning on the
deck of the usual commodious
hand-propelled ark; made it two or three times, and could
have made it with increasing interest and enjoyment many
times more; for, of
course, the palaces and temples would
grow more and more beautiful every time one saw
them, for
that happens with all such things; also, I think one would not
get tired
of the bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities
in getting out of them and into them again without
exposing too much bronze, nor
of their devotional gesticulations
and absorbed bead-tellings.
But I should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths
with that dreadful water and
drink it. In fact, I did get tired
of it, and very early, too. At one place where we
halted for a
while, the foul gush from a sewer was making the water turbid
and
murky all around, and there was a random corpse slopping
around in it that had floated
down from up country. Ten steps
THE PURIFYING WATERS OF THE GANGES.
below that place stood a crowd of men, women, and comely
young maidens waist deep in the water—and they were
scooping it up in their hands and drinking it. Faith can certainly
do wonders, and this is an instance of it. Those people
were not drinking that fearful stuff to assuage thirst, but in
order to purify their souls and the interior of their bodies.
According to their creed, the Ganges water makes everything
pure that it touches—instantly and utterly pure. The sewer
water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt
them; the sacred water had touched both, and both were now
snow-pure, and could defile no one. The memory of that sight
will always stay by me; but not by request.
A word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying
Ganges water. When we went to
Agra, by and by, we happened
there just in time to be in at the birth of a marvel—a
memorable
scientific discovery—the discovery that in certain
ways the foul and derided
Ganges water is the most puissant
purifier in the world! This
curious fact, as I have said, had
just been added to the treasury of modern science. It
had
long been noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often
afflicted with
the cholera she does not spread it beyond her
borders. This could not be accounted for.
Mr. Henkin, the
scientist in the employ of the government of Agra, concluded
to
examine the water. He went to Benares and made his
tests. He got water at the mouths of
the sewers where they
empty into the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre
of it contained millions of germs; at the end of six hours
they were all dead. He caught a floating corpse, towed it to
the shore, and
from beside it he dipped up water that was
swarming with cholera germs; at the end of
six hours they were
all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this
water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample.
Repeatedly, he took pure well water which was barren
of animal life, and put into it a few cholera germs; they always
began to propagate at once, and always within six hours they
swarmed—and were numberable by millions upon millions.
For ages and ages the Hindoos have had absolute faith that
the water of the Ganges was
absolutely pure, could not be
defiled by any contact whatsoever, and infallibly made
pure
and clean whatsoever thing touched it. They still believe it,
and that is why
they bathe in it and drink it, caring nothing
for its seeming
filthiness and the floating corpses. The Hindoos
have been laughed at, these many
generations, but the laughter
will need to modify itself a little from now on. How did
they find out the water's
secret in those ancient ages? Had
they germ-scientists then? We do not know. We only
know
that they had a civilization long before we emerged from
savagery. But to
return to where I was before; I was about
to speak of the burning-ghat.
They do not burn fakeers—those revered mendicants.
They are so holy that
they can get to their place without that
sacrament, provided they be consigned to the
consecrating
river. We saw one carried to mid-stream and thrown overboard.
He was sandwiched between two great slabs of stone.
We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine
corpses burned. I should not
wish to see any more of it,
unless I might select the parties. The mourners follow the
bier through the town and down to the ghat; then the bier-bearers
deliver the body to some low-caste natives—Doms—
and the
mourners turn about and go back home. I heard no
crying and saw no tears, there was no
ceremony of parting.
Apparently, these expressions of grief and affection are reserved
for the privacy of the home. The dead women came draped
in red, the men in white.
They are laid in the water at the
river's edge while the pyre is being prepared.
The first subject was a man. When the Doms unswathed
him to wash him, he proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished
and handsome old gentleman, with not a sign about him
to suggest that he had ever been ill. Dry wood was brought
and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it and
covered over with fuel.
Then a naked holy man
who was sitting on high
ground a little distance
away began to talk and
shout with great energy,
and he kept up this noise
right along. It may have
been the funeral sermon,
and probably was. I forgot
to say that one of the
mourners remained behind
when the others went away.
This was the dead man's
son, a boy of ten or twelve,
brown and handsome, grave
and self-possessed, and
clothed in flowing white.
He was there to burn his father. He was given a torch, and
while he slowly walked seven times around the pyre the
naked black man on the high ground poured out his sermon
more clamorously than ever. The seventh circuit completed,
the boy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet;
the flames sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and
the lad went away. Hindoos do not want daughters, because
their weddings make such a ruinous expense; but they want
sons, so that at death they may have honorable exit from the
world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having
one's pyre lighted by one's son. The father who dies sonless
EXTRA EXPENSE.
is in a grievous situation indeed, and is pitied. Life being
uncertain, the Hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the
hope that he will have a son ready when the day of his need
shall come. But if he have no son, he will adopt one. This
answers every purpose.
Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others. It is a
dismal business. The
stokers did not sit down in idleness, but
moved briskly about, punching up the fires
with long poles,
and now and then adding fuel. Sometimes they hoisted the
half of
a skeleton into the air, then slammed it down and beat
it with the pole, breaking it up
so that it would burn better.
They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and
battered them. The sight was hard to bear; it would have
been harder if the
mourners had stayed to witness it. I had
but a moderate desire to see a cremation, so it
was soon satisfied.
For sanitary reasons it would be well if cremation were universal;
but this form is revolting, and not to be
recommended.
The fire used is sacred, of course—for there is money in it.
Ordinary fire
is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was
told that this sacred fire is all furnished
by one person, and
that he has a monopoly of it and charges a good price for it.
Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand rupees for it. To
get to paradise from India is
an expensive thing. Every detail
connected with the matter costs something, and helps to
fatten a priest. I suppose
it is quite safe to conclude that that
fire-bug is in holy orders.
Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones
which are remembrances of
the suttee. Each has a rough
carving upon it, representing a man and a woman standing or
walking hand in hand, and marks the spot where a widow
went to her death by fire
in the days when the suttee flourished.
Mr. Parker said that widows would burn
themselves now
if the government would allow it. The family that can point
to one of these little memorials and say:
"She who burned herself there was an
ancestress of ours," is envied.
MONKEY ANTICS.
It is a curious people. With them, all
life seems to be sacred except human life.
Even the life of vermin is sacred, and must
not be taken. The good Jain wipes off
a
seat before using it, lest he cause the death
of some valueless insect by
sitting down on
it. It grieves him to have to drink water,
because the provisions
in his stomach may
not agree with the microbes. Yet
India invented Thuggery and
the
Suttee. India is a hard country to
understand.
We went to the temple of the
Thug goddess, Bhowance, or Kali, or
Durga. She has
these names and
others. She is the only god to whom
living sacrifices are made.
Goats are
sacrificed to her. Monkeys would
be cheaper. There are plenty of them
about the place. Being sacred, they
make themselves very free, and scramble
around wherever they please. The
temple and its porch are beautifully
carved, but this is not the case with
the idol. Bhowanee
is not
pleasant to look
at. She has a
silver face, and a projecting
swollen
tongue painted a deep red. She wears a necklace of skulls.
In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or
attractive. And what a swarm of
them there is! The town
is a vast museum of idols—and all of them crude,
misshapen,
and ugly. They flock through one's dreams at night, a wild
mob of
nightmares. When you get tired of them in the
temples and take a trip on the river, you
find idol giants,
flashily painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And
apparently wherever there is room for one more lingam, a
lingam is there. If Vishnu had
foreseen what his town was
going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg.
The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of
slender white minarets which
tower like masts from the great
Mosque of Aurangzeb. They seem to be always in sight,
from
everywhere, those airy, graceful, inspiring things. But masts
is not the
right word, for masts have a perceptible taper, while
these minarets have not. They are
142 feet high, and only 8 ½
feet in diameter at the base, and 7 ½
at the summit—scarcely
any taper at all. These are the proportions of a
candle; and
fair and fairy-like candles these are. Will be, anyway, some
day, when
the Christians inherit them and top them with the
electric light. There is a great view
from up there—a wonderful
view. A large gray monkey was part of it, and damaged
it. A monkey has no
judgment. This one was skipping about
the upper great heights of the
mosque—skipping across empty
yawning intervals which were almost too wide for
him, and
which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his
teeth.
He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view.
I couldn't look at anything but
him. Every time he went
sailing over one of those abysses my breath stood still, and
when he grabbed for the perch he was going for, I grabbed
too, in sympathy. And he
was perfectly indifferent, perfectly
unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself. He
came
within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so
troubled about
him that I would have shot him if I had had
anything to do it with. But I strongly recommend the view.
There is more monkey than view, and there is always going to
be more monkey while that idiot survives, but what view you
get is superb. All Benares, the river, and the region round
about are spread before you. Take a gun, and look at the view.
The next thing I saw was more reposeful. It was a new
kind of art. It was a picture
painted on water. It was done
by a native. He sprinkled fine dust of various colors on
the
still surface of a basin of water, and out of these sprinklings a
dainty and
pretty picture gradually grew, a picture which
a breath could destroy. Somehow it was
impressive, after so
much browsing among massive and battered and decaying
fanes
that rest upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other
ruins, and those upon still
others again. It was a sermon,
an allegory, a symbol of Instability. Those creations in
stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all.
A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings
had Benares for its theater. Wherever that extraordinary
man set his foot, he left his mark. He came to Benares
in 1781 to collect a fine
of £500,000 which he had levied upon
its Rajah, Cheit Singh, on behalf of the
East India Company.
Hastings was a long way from home and help. There were,
probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah
was in his fort with his
myriads around him. But no matter.
From his little camp in a neighboring garden,
Hastings sent a
party to arrest the sovereign. He sent on this daring mission
a
couple of hundred native soldiers—sepoys—under command
of three young English lieutenants. The Rajah submitted
without a word. The incident lights up the Indian
situation electrically, and
gives one a vivid sense of the strides
which the English had made and the mastership
they had
acquired in the land since the date of Clive's great victory.
In a
quarter of a century, from being nobodies, and feared by
none, they were become
confessed lords and masters, feared by
all, sovereigns included, and served by all, sovereigns included.
It makes the fairy tales sound true. The English had not
been afraid to enlist native soldiers to fight against their own
people and keep them obedient. And now Hastings was not
afraid to come away out to this remote place with a handful
of such soldiers and send them to arrest a native sovereign.
The lieutenants imprisoned the Rajah in his own fort. It
was beautiful, the pluckiness
of it, the impudence of it. The
arrest enraged the Rajah's people, and all Benares came
storming about the place and threatening vengeance. And
yet, but for an accident,
nothing important would have
resulted, perhaps. The mob found out a most strange thing,
an almost incredible thing—that this handful of soldiers had
come on
this hardy errand with empty guns and no ammunition.
This
has been attributed to thoughtlessness, but it could
hardly have been that, for in such
large emergencies as this,
intelligent people do think. It must
have been indifference,
an over-confidence born of the proved submissiveness of the
native character, when confronted by even one or two stern
Britons in their war
paint. But, however that may be, it was
a fatal discovery that the mob had made. They
were full of
courage, now, and they broke into the fort and massacred the
helpless
soldiers and their officers. Hastings escaped from
Benares by night and got safely away,
leaving the principality
in a state of wild insurrection; but he was back again within
the month, and quieted it down in his prompt and virile way,
and took the Rajah's
throne away from him and gave it to
another man. He was a capable kind of person was
Warren
Hastings. This was the only time he was ever out of ammunition.
Some of his acts have left stains upon his name which
can
never be washed away, but he saved to England the
Indian Empire, and that was the best
service that was ever
done to the Indians themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred
centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse.
CHAPTER LIII.
True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
was in Benares that I saw another living god. That
makes
two. I believe I have seen most of the greater and
lesser wonders of the world, but I do
not remember that
any of them interested me so overwhelmingly as did that pair
of
gods.
When I try to account for this effect I find no difficulty
about it. I find that, as a
rule, when a thing is a wonder to
us it is not because of what we
see in it, but because of what
others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second
hand. We are eager to see any celebrated thing—and we
never fail of our
reward; just the deep privilege of gazing
upon an object which has stirred the
enthusiasm or evoked the
reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our race
is a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we
have seen it, we are
permanently enriched from having seen
it, we would not part with the memory of that
experience for
a great price. And yet that very spectacle may be the Taj.
You cannot keep your enthusiasms down, you cannot keep
your emotions within bounds
when that soaring bubble of
marble breaks upon your view. But these are not your
enthusiasms
and emotions—they are the accumulated emotions and
enthusiasms of a
thousand fervid writers, who have been slowly
and steadily storing them up in your heart
day by day and
year by year all your life; and now they burst out in a flood
and
overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit happier if
they were your very own. By and by you sober down, and then
you perceive that you have been drunk on the smell of somebody
else's cork. For ever and ever the memory of my distant
first glimpse of the Taj will compensate me for creeping
around the globe to have that great privilege.
But the Taj—with all your inflation of delusive emotions,
acquired at
second-hand from people to whom in the majority
of cases they were also delusions
acquired at second-hand—a
thing which you fortunately did not think of or it
might have
made you doubtful of what you imagined were your own—
what
is the Taj as a marvel, a spectacle and an uplifting and
overpowering wonder, compared
with a living, breathing,
speaking personage whom several millions of human beings
devoutly and sincerely and unquestioningly believe to be a
God, and humbly and
gratefully worship as a God?
He was sixty years old when I saw him. He is called Sri
108 Swami Bhaskarananda
Saraswati. That is one form of it.
I think that that is what you would call him in
speaking to
him—because it is short. But you would use more of his name
in addressing a letter to him; courtesy would require this. Even
then you would not have
to use all of it, but only this much:
Sri 108 Matparamahansapariv ajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati.
You do not put "Esq." after it, for that is not necessary.
The word which opens the volley is itself a title of honor—
"Sri." The
"108" stands for the rest of his names, I believe.
Vishnu has 108 names which he does
not use in business, and
no doubt it is a custom of gods and a privilege sacred to their
order to keep 108 extra ones in stock. Just the restricted
name set down above is
a handsome property, without the 108.
By my count it has 58 letters in it. This removes
the long
German words from competition; they are permanently out of
the race.
Sri 108 S. B. Saraswati has attained to what among the
Hindoos is called the "state of
perfection." It is a state which
other Hindoos reach by being born again and again, and
over
and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation
after
another—a tiresome long job covering centuries and
decades of centuries, and
one that is full of risks, too, like
the accident of dying on the wrong side of the
Ganges some
time or other and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh
start
necessary and the numerous trips to be made all over
again. But in reaching perfection,
Sri 108 S. B. S. has escaped
all that. He is no longer a part or a feature of this
world; his substance has changed, all earthiness has departed out of it;
he is utterly
holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate this
holiness or stain this purity; he is no
longer of the earth, its
concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and
troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he
will be absorbed into
the substance of the Supreme Deity and
be at peace forever.
The Hindoo Scriptures point out how this state is to be
reached, but it is only once
in a thousand years, perhaps, that
candidate accomplishes it. This one has traversed the
course
required, stage by stage, from the beginning to the end, and
now has
nothing left to do but wait for the call which shall
release him from a world in which
he has now no part nor lot.
First, he passed through the student stage, and became
learned
in the holy books. Next he became citizen, householder, husband,
and father. That was the required second stage. Then
—like John Bunyan's Christian—he bade perpetual good-bye
to his
family, as required, and went wandering away. He
went far into the desert and served a
term as hermit. Next,
he became a beggar, "in accordance with the rites laid down
in the Scriptures," and wandered about India eating the bread
of mendicancy. A quarter
of a century ago he reached the
stage of purity. This needs no garment; its symbol is nudity;
he discarded the waist-cloth which he had previously worn.
He could resume it now if he chose, for neither that nor any
other contact can defile him; but he does not choose.
There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember
what they are. But he has been through them.
Throughout the long course he was
perfecting himself in holy
learning, and writing commentaries upon the sacred books.
He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that now.
White marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about
India. He lives in a good
house in a noble great garden in
Benares, all meet and proper to his stupendous rank.
Necessarily
he does not go abroad in the streets. Deities would
never be able to move about
handily in any country. If one
whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroad
in
our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all
traffic would be
blocked and business would come to a standstill.
This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all
things considered, for if he
wanted to live in a palace he would
only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly
build it.
Sometimes he sees devotees for a moment, and comforts them
and blesses
them, and they kiss his feet and go away happy.
Rank is nothing to him, he being a god.
To him all men are
alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom
he
pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to
a pauper; at other times he
receives the pauper and turns the
prince away. However, he does not receive many of
either
class. He has to husband his time for his meditations. I
think he would
receive Rev. Mr. Parker at any time. I think
he is sorry for Mr. Parker, and I think Mr.
Parker is sorry for
him; and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them.
When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a
little while and wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had
been turning away Maharajas that day and receiving only the
riff-raff, and we belonged in between, somewhere. But presently,
a servant came out saying it was all right, he was coming.
And sure enough, he came, and I saw him—that object of
the worship of
millions. It was a strange sensation, and
thrilling. I wish I could feel it stream
through my veins
again. And yet, to me he was not a god, he was only a Taj.
The
thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me secondhand
from those invisible millions of
believers. By a hand-shake
with their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got
their
monster battery's whole charge.
He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean
cut and conspicuously
intellectual face, and a deep and kindly
eye. He looked many years older than he really
was, but
much study and meditation and fasting and prayer, with the
arid life he
had led as hermit and beggar, could account for
that. He is wholly nude when he receives
natives, of whatever
rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now,
a concession to Mr. Parker's Europe prejudices, no doubt.
As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very
well together, and I found
him a most pleasant and friendly
deity. He had heard a deal about Chicago, and showed a
quite remarkable interest in it, for a god. It all came of the
World's Fair and
the Congress of Religions. If India knows
about nothing else American, she knows about
those, and will
keep them in mind one while.
He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention
which made me believe in him, but I had been having my
doubts before. He wrote his
in his book, and I have a reverent
regard for that book, though the words run from right to
left, and so I can't read
it. It was a mistake to print in that
way. It contains his voluminous comments on the
Hindoo
holy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for
perfection myself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn.
I thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with
his meditations on Brahma, for he looked tired, and I knew
that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do him any harm.PAGE FROM BAHADUR'S BOOK.
He has a scholar meditating under him—Mina Bahadur
Rana—but we
did not see him. He wears clothes and is
very imperfect. He has written a little
pamphlet about his
master, and I have that. It contains a wood-cut of the master
and himself seated on a rug in the garden. The portrait of
the master is very good
indeed. The posture is exactly that
which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long
arms and
limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber
man. There is a life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S.
in the garden. It represents him in this same posture.
TITLE PAGE OF BAHADUR'S BOOK.
Dear me! It is a strange
world. Particularly the Indian
division of it. This
pupil, Mina
Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace
person, but a man
of distinguished capacities and
attainments, and,
apparently,
he had a fine worldly career in
front of him. He was serving
the
Nepal Government in a
high capacity at the Court of
the Viceroy of India, twenty
years ago. He was an able
man, educated, a thinker, a man
of property. But
the longing
to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he
resigned
his place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts
of the world, and went away into the solitudes to live in
a hut and study the
sacred writings and meditate upon virtue
and holiness and seek to attain them. This sort
of religion
resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich to give away
all their
property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly
comfort. American and English
millionaires do it every
day, and thus verify and confirm to the world the tremendous
forces that lie in religion. Yet many people scoff at
them for this loyalty to
duty, and many will scoff at Mina
Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like many
Christians
of great character and intellect, he has made the study
of his
Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries
upon them the loving labor of his life. Like them, he has
believed that his was not an idle and foolish waste of his life,
but a most worthy and honorable employment of it. Yet,
there are many people who will see in those others, men
worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a
crank. But I shall not. He has my reverence. And I don't
offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing
and of value. The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined
and explained by the dictionary costs nothing. Reverence
for one's own sacred things—parents, religion, flag, laws, and
respect for one's own beliefs—these are feelings which we
cannot even help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary,
like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing.
But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal
merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion,
to the political or religious attitude of a man whose
beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics,
and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his
belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could
respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very,
very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever
try. If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a
crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because
now we can't burn him.
We are always canting about people's "irreverence," always
charging this offense upon
somebody or other, and thereby
intimating that we are better than that person and do not
commit that offense ourselves. Whenever we do this we are
in a lying attitude, and
our speech is cant; for none of us are
reverent—in a meritorious way; deep
down in our hearts we
are all irreverent. There is probably not a single exception to
this rule in the earth. There is probably not one person whose
reverence rises
higher than respect for his own sacred things;
and therefore, it is not a thing to boast about and be proud of,
since the most degraded savage has that—and, like the best of
us, has nothing higher. To speak plainly, we despise all reverences
and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale
of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency,
we are shocked when other people despise and defile
the things which are holy to us. Suppose we should meet with
a paragraph like the following, in the newspapers:
"Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a
picnic at Mount Vernon, and
in the tomb of Washington they
ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and
danced waltzes and polkas."
Should we be shocked? Should we feel outraged? Should
we be amazed? Should we call the
performance a desecration?
Yes, that would all happen.
We should denounce
those people in round terms, and call them hard names.
And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers:
"Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires
had a picnic in Westminster
Abbey, and in that sacred place
they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played
games, and
danced waltzes and polkas."
Would the English be shocked? Would they feel outraged?
Would they be amazed? Would they call the performance
a desecration? That would all happen. The pork-millionaires
would be denounced in round terms; they would
be called hard names.
In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America's
most honored son; in the Abbey,
the ashes of England's
greatest dead; the tomb of tombs, the costliest in the earth,
the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built by a great Emperor
to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect
mother, one in whom there was no
spot or blemish, whose love
was his stay and support, whose life was the light of the
world
to him; in it her ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of
India it is a holy place;
to them it is what Mount
Vernon is to Americans,
it is what the Abbey is
to the English.
A PICNIC IN A SEPULCHRE.
Major Sleeman wrote
forty or fifty years ago
(the italics are
mine):
"I would here cnter my
humble protest against the quadrille
and lunch parties which are
sometimes given to European
ladies and
gentlemen of the
station at this imperial tomb;
drinking and dancing are no
doubt very good things in their
season, but they are sadly out
of place in a sepulchre."
Were there any Americans
among those lunch
parties? If they were invited,
there were.
If my imagined lunch-parties in Westminster and the tomb
of Washington should take
place, the incident would cause a
vast outbreak of bitter eloquence about Barbarism and
Irreverence;
and it would come from two sets of people
who would
go next day and dance in the Taj if they had a chance.
As we took our leave of the Benares god and started away
we noticed a group of natives
waiting respectfully just within
the gate—a Rajah from somewhere in India,
and some people
of lesser consequence. The god beckoned them to come, and
as we
passed out the Rajah was kneeling and reverently kissing
his sacred feet.
If Barnum—but Barnum's ambitions are at rest. This
god will remain in the
holy peace and seclusion of his garden,
undisturbed. Barnum could not have gotten him,
anyway.
Still, he would have found a substitute that would answer.
CHAPTER LIV.
Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad
investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
railway journey of seventeen and a
half hours
brought us to the capital of India, which is
likewise the capital of
Bengal—Calcutta. Like Bombay,
it has a population
of nearly a million natives and a small
gathering of white people. It is a huge city and
fine, and is
called the City of Palaces. It is rich in historical memories;
rich
in British achievement—military, political, commercial;
rich in the results
of the miracles done by that brace of
mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings. And has a
cloud-kissing
monument to one Ochterlony.
It is a fluted candlestick 250 feet high. This lingam is the
only large monument in
Calcutta, I believe. It is a fine
ornament, and will keep Ochterlony in mind.
Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you
can see it; and always when
you see it you think of Ochterlony.
And so there is not
an hour in the day that you do not
think of Ochterlony and wonder who he was. It is good
that
Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was for Plassey;
and then that
great spirit would be wounded when the revelation
came that it was not. Clive would find
out that it was for
Ochterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle.
And he
would think it was a great one, too, and he would say,
"With three thousand I whipped
sixty thousand and founded
the Empire—and there is no monument; this other
soldier must
have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the world."
But he would be mistaken. Ochterlony was a man, not a
battle. And he did good and
honorable service, too; as good
and honorable service as has been done in India by seventy-five
or a hundred other Englishmen of courage, rectitude, and
distinguished capacity.
For India has been a fertile breeding-ground
of such men, and remains so; great men, both in war
and in the civil service, and
as modest as great. But they
have no monuments, and were not expecting any. Ochterlony
could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all
likely that he desired
one—certainly not until Clive and
Hastings should be supplied. Every day
Clive and Hastings
lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder
which of the two the monument is for; and they fret and
worry because they cannot find
out, and so the peace of
heaven is spoiled for them and lost. But not for Ochterlony.
Ochterlony is not troubled. He doesn't suspect that it is his
monument. Heaven is
sweet and peaceful to him. There is a
sort of unfairness about it all.
Indeed, if monuments were always given in India for high
achievements, duty straitly
performed, and smirchless records,
the landscape would be monotonous with them. The
handful
of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent
ease, and
without noticeable friction, through tact, training,
and distinguished administrative
ability, reinforced by just and
liberal laws—and by keeping their word to the
native whenever
they give it.
England is far from India and knows little about the
eminent services performed by her
servants there, for it is the
newspaper correspondent who makes fame, and he is not sent
to India but to the continent, to report the doings of the
princelets and the
dukelets, and where they are visiting and
whom they are marrying. Often a British
official spends
thirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade
by services which would make him celebrated anywhere else,
and finishes as a vice-sovereign, governing a great realm and
millions of subjects; then he goes home to England substantially
unknown and unheard of, and settles down in some
modest corner, and is as one extinguished. Ten years later
there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the
reader is paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is
not sure that he had ever heard of before. But meanwhile he
has learned all about the continental princelets and dukelets.
The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that
lie remote from his own. When
they are mentioned in his
presence one or two facts and maybe a couple of names rise
like torches in his mind, lighting up an inch or two of it and
leaving the rest
all dark. The mention of Egypt suggests
some Biblical facts and the
Pyramids—nothing more. The
mention of South Africa suggests Kimberly and the
diamonds
and there an end. Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of
America suggested
a name—George Washington—with that
his familiarity with our
country was exhausted. Latterly his
familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that
when America
is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of
his
mind and he says, "Ah, the country of the great man—
Washington; and of the
Holy City—Chicago." For he
knows about the Congress of Religion, and this has
enabled
him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago.
When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it
suggests Clive, Hastings,
the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number
of other great events; and the mention of Calcutta
infallibly
brings up the Black Hole. And so, when that citizen finds
himself in
the capital of India he goes first of all to see the
Black Hole of
Calcutta—and is disappointed.
The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long
ago. It is strange. Just as
it stood, it was itself a monu-
ment; a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete, its
materials were strong
and lasting, it needed no furbishing up,
no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone.
It was the first
brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a mighty
Empire—the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the
ghastly episode of the
Black Hole that maddened the British
and brought Clive, that young military marvel,
raging up from
Madras; it was the seed from which sprung Plassey; and it
was that
extraordinary battle, whose like had not been seen in
the earth since Agincourt, that
laid deep and strong the
foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty.
And yet within the time of men who still live, the Black
Hole was torn down and thrown
away as carelessly as if its
bricks were common clay, not ingots of historic gold. There
is no accounting for human beings.
The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved
plate. I saw that; and better that than nothing.
The Black Hole was a
prison—a cell is nearer the right word
—eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an ordinary bed-chamber;
and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengal
packed 146
of his English prisoners. There was hardly standing
room for them; scarcely a breath of
air was to be got; the
time was night, the weather sweltering hot. Before the dawn
came, the captives were all dead but twenty-three. Mr.
Holwell's long account of the
awful episode was familiar to
the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in
print
even an extract from it in our day. Among the striking
things in it is this.
Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept
himself alive by sucking the perspiration from
his sleeves. It
gives one a vivid idea of the situation. He presently found
that
while he was busy drawing life from one of his sleeves a
young English gentleman was
stealing supplies from the other
one. Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most
generous
impulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and
rare qualities; yet when he found out what was happening to
that unwatched sleeve, he took the precaution to suck that
one dry first. The miseries of the Black Hole were able to
change even a nature like his. But that young gentleman
was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the
stolen perspiration that saved his life. From the middle of
Mr. Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt:
"Then a general prayer to Heaven, to hasten the approach of the flames
to the right
and left of us, and put a period to our misery. But these failing,
they whose strength
and spirits were quite exhausted laid themselves down
and expired quietly upon their
fellows: others who had yet some strength
and vigor left made a last effort at the
windows, and several succeeded by
leaping and scrambling over the backs and heads of
those in the first rank,
and got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing
them. Many to
the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon
suffocated;
for now a steam arose from the living and the dead, which affected us in all
its circumstances as if we were forcibly held with our heads over a bowl full
of
strong volatile spirit of hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia
of the one
be distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced
by the load upon my
head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was obliged,
near as I was to the window,
instantly to raise it again to avoid suffocation. I
need not, my dear friend, ask your
commiseration, when I tell you, that in this
plight, from half an hour past eleven till
near two in the morning, I sustained
the weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my
back, and the pressure of
his whole body on my head. A Dutch surgeon who had taken his
seat upon
my left shoulder, and a Topaz (a black Christian soldier)
bearing on my
right; all which nothing could have enabled me to support but the props
and
pressure equally sustaining me all around. The two latter I frequently dislodged
by shifting my hold on the bars and driving my knuckles into their
ribs; but my
friend above stuck fast, held immovable by two bars.
"I exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials and
efforts I made
to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me at last
quite exhausted me; and
towards two o'clock, finding I must quit the window
or sink where I was, I resolved on
the former, having bore, truly for the sake
of others, infinitely more for life than the
best of it is worth. In the rank
close behind me was an officer of one of the ships,
whose name was Cary, and
who had behaved with much bravery during the siege
(his wife, a fine
woman, though country born, would not quit him, but
accompanied him into
the prison, and was one who survived). This poor wretch
had been long raving
for water and air; I told him I was determined to give up life, and
recommended
his gaining my station. On my quitting it he made a fruitless
attempt to get my place;
but the Dutch surgeon, who sat on my shoulder,
supplanted him. Poor Cary expressed his
thankfulness, and said he would
give up life too; but it was with the utmost labor we forced our way from
the window (several in the inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable
to fall by the throng and equal pressure around). He laid himself down to
die; and his death, I believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full, sanguine
man. His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not retired with
me, I should never have been able to force my way. I was at this time sensible
of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can give you no better idea of my
situation than by repeating my simile of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. I
found a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old
man, the Rev. Mr. Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant,
hand in hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I had lain
there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some uneasiness
in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead, as I myself had
done to others. With some difficulty I raised myself, and gained the platform
a second time, where I presently lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility
that I have been able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash
being uneasy about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what
passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of horrows,
I can give you no account."
There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not
plenty of time for it. I saw
the fort that Clive built; and the
place where Warren Hastings and the author of the
Junius
Letters fought their duel; and the great botanical gardens;
and the
fashionable afternoon turnout in the Maidan; and a
grand review of the garrison in a
great plain at sunrise; and a
military tournament in which great bodies of native
soldiery
exhibited the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular
and
beautiful show occupying several nights and closing with the
mimic storming of a native
fort which was as good as the reality
for thrilling and accurate detail, and better than
the reality for
security and comfort; we had a pleasure excursion on the
Hoogly by courtesy of friends, and devoted the rest of the time
to social life and the Indian museum. One should spend a
month in the museum, an
enchanted palace of Indian antiquities.
Indeed, a person might spend half a year among
the beautiful
and wonderful things without exhausting their interest.
It was winter. We were of Kipling's "hosts of tourists
who travel up and down India in
the cold weather showing
how things ought to be managed." It is a common expression
there, "the cold weather," and the people think there is such
a thing. It is because they have lived there half a lifetime,
and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person is
accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather
are not valuable. I had read, in the histories, that the June
marches made between Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British
forces in the time of the Mutiny were made in that kind of
weather—138 in the shade—and had taken it for historical
embroidery. I had read it again in Serjeant-Major
Forbes-Mitchell's account of his military
experiences in the Mutiny—at least I
thought I had—and in Calcutta I asked him
if it was true, and he said it was. An officer
of high rank who had been in the thick of the
Mutiny said the same. As long as those men
were talking about what they knew, they
were trustworthy, and I believed them; but
when they said it was now "cold weather," I
saw that they had traveled outside of their
sphere of knowledge and were floundering.
I believe that in India "cold weather" is
merely a conventional phrase and has come
into use through the necessity of having some
way to distinguish between weather which
will melt a brass door-knob and weather
which will only make it mushy. It was
observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta,
showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was
told the change to porcelain was not usually made until May.
But this cold weather was too warm for us; so we started to
Darjeeling, in the Himalayas—a twenty-four hour journey.
MUSHY WEATHER.
CHAPTER LV.
There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely
forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
February 14. We left at 4:30 P.M. Until dark we
moved through
rich vegetation, then changed to a
boat and crossed the Ganges.
February 15. Up with the sun. A brilliant morning, and
frosty.
A double suit of flannels is found necessary. The
plain is perfectly level, and seems to
stretch away and away
and away, dimming and softening, to the uttermost bounds of
nowhere. What a soaring, strenuous, gushing fountain spray
of delicate greenery a bunch
of bamboo is! As far as the eye
can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the view,
their
spoutings refined to steam by distance. And there are fields
of bananas,
with the sunshine glancing from the varnished
surface of their drooping vast leaves. And
there are frequent
groves of palm; and an effective accent is given to the landscape
by isolated individuals of this picturesque family, towering,
clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and hanging ragged,
Nature's
imitation of an umbrella that has been out to see
what a cyclone is like and is trying
not to look disappointed.
And everywhere through the soft morning vistas we
glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages,
thatched, built of
clean new matting, snuggling among grouped
palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages,
villages, no end of
villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens
of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of
miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the
biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European
kingdom. I have seen no such city as this before. And there
is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked
men in view on both sides and ahead. We fly through it
mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and
ahead—brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the
fields. But not a woman. In these two hours I have not
seen a woman or a girl working in the fields. "From Greenland's icy mountains,From India's coral strand,Where Afric's sunny fountainsRoll down their golden sand.From many an ancient river,From many a palmy plain,They call us to deliverTheir land from error's chain."
INDIA.
Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my
memory all my life. But if
the closing lines are true, let us
hope that when we come to answer the call and deliver
the
land from its errors, we shall secrete from it some of our
high-civilization
ways, and at the same time borrow some of
its pagan ways to enrich our high system with.
We have a
right to do this. If we lift those people up, we have a right to
lift ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. A
few years ago I spent several weeks at Tölz, in Bavaria. It
is a Roman Catholic region, and not even Benares is more
deeply or pervasively or intelligently devout. In my diary of
those days I find this:
"We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country roads.
But it was a
drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of ways: by the
dreadful shrines and by the
shameful spectacle of gray and vencrable old
grandmothers toiling in the fields. The
shrines were frequent along the
roads—figures of the Saviour nailed to the
cross and streaming with blood
from the wounds of the nails and the thorns.
"When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan
idols? I saw many
women seventy and even eighty years old mowing and
binding in the fields, and
pitchforking the loads into the wagons."
I was in Austria later, and in Munich. In Munich I saw
gray old women pushing trucks
up hill and down, long distances,
trucks laden with
barrels of beer, incredible loads. In
my Austrian diary I find this:
"In the fields I often see a
woman and a cow harnessed to the
plow, and a man
driving.
"In the public street of Marienbad
to-day, I saw an old, bent, gray-headed
woman, in harness with a
dog, drawing a laden sled over
bare
dirt roads and bare pavements; and
at his case walked the driver, smoking
his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty
years old."
AUSTRIA.
Five or six years ago I
bought an open boat, made
a kind of a canvas wagon-roof
over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a
courier and a
boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage
down the Rhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles. In
my diary of that trip I find
this entry. I was far down the
Rhone then:
"Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P.M. On a distant ridge inland, a tall openwork
structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing
on it. A
devout country. All down this river, wherever there is a crag
there is a statue of the
Virgin on it. I believe I have seen a hundred of
them. And yet, in many respects, the
peasantry seem to be mere pagans,
and destitute of any considerable degree of
civilization.
" … .We reached a not very promising-looking village about 4
o'clock, and I
concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and fogging
the hood with pipe-smoke had
grown monotonous; I could not have the hood
furled, because the floods of rain fell
unceasingly. The tavern was on the
river bank, as is the custom. It was dull there, and
melancholy—nothing to
do but look out of the window into the drenching rain,
and shiver; one could
do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and country France
furnishes
no fire. Winter overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented
with rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with
such force that
they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes.
FRANCE.
"With the exception of
a very occasional woodenshod
peasant, nobody was
abroad in this bitter weather
—I mean nobody
of our
sex. But all weathers are
alike to the women in these
continental
countries. To
them and the other animals,
life is serious; nothing interrupts
their slavery.
Three of them were washing
clothes in the river under
the window when I
arrived, and they continued
at it as long as there was
light to work by. One was
apparently thirty; another
—the
mother!—above
fifty; the third—grandmother!—so
old and worn
and gray she could have
passed for eighty; I took
her to
be that old. They had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over
their shoulders they
were gunny-sacks—simply conductors for rivers of
water; some of the volume
reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the
way.
"At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable,
smoking his
pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey-cart—husband,
son, and grandson
of those women! He stood up in the cart, sheltering himself,
and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command,
and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough.
Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the
orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing into the
cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction. There were six of the great
baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength could not have lifted any one
of them. The cart being full now, the Frenchman descended, still sheltered
by his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward,
trudging in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the
deluge and lost to sight.
"When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle
of wine and plate
of food on a bare table black with grease, and was
"chomping" like a horse. He had the
little religious paper which is in
everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was
enlightening himself with
the histories of French saints who used to flee to the desert
in the Middle
Ages to escape the contamination of woman. For two hundred years France
has been sending missionaries to other savage lands. To spare to the needy
from
poverty like hers is fine and true generosity."
But to get back to India—where, as my favorite poem
says—
It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not
introduced their civilization to
him yet. But Bavaria and
Austria and France are on their way. They are coming.
They will rescue him; they will refine the vileness out of
him.
Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains,
we changed from the regular
train to one composed of little
canvas-sheltered cars that skimmed along within a foot
of the
ground and seemed to be going fifty miles an hour when they
were really
making about twenty. Each car had seating
capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when
the curtains were
up one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere,
and get all the breeze, and be luxuriously
comfortable.
It was not a pleasure excursion in name only, but in fact.
After a while we stopped at a little wooden coop of a station
just within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with
a deep and dense forest
of great trees and scrub and vines all
about it. The royal Bengal tiger is in great
force there, and
is very bold and unconventional. From this lonely little station
a message once went to the railway manager in Calcutta:
"Tiger eating station
master on front porch; telegraph instructions."
It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen.
We were presently away again, and the train began to
climb the mountains. In one
place seven wild elephants
crossed the track, but two of them got away before I could
overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is forty
miles, and it takes
eight hours to make it. It is so wild and
interesting and exciting and enchanting that
it ought to take a
week. As for the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle
seemed
to contain samples of every rare and curious tree and
bush that we had ever seen or
heard of. It is from that
museum, I think, that the globe must have been supplied with
the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.
The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes
winding in and out under lofty
cliffs that are smothered in
vines and foliage, and around the edges of bottomless
chasms;
and all the way one glides by files of picturesque natives, some
carrying
burdens up, others going down from their work in
the tea-gardens; and once there was a
gaudy wedding procession,
all bright tinsel and color,
and a bride, comely and girlish,
who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin,
exposing
her face with that pure delight which the young and happy
take in sin for
sin's own sake.
By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and
from that breezy height we
looked down and afar over a wonderful
picture—the Plains of India, stretching to the horizon,
soft and fair,
level as a floor, shimmering with heat, mottled
with cloud-shadows, and cloven with
shining rivers. Immediately
below us, and receding down, down, down, toward the
valley, was a shaven confusion
of hilltops, with ribbony roads
and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them
and about them, every curve and twist sharply distinct.
At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and
it shut out the world and
kept it shut out. We climbed 1,000
feet higher, then began to descend, and presently got
down to
Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet above the level of the Plains.
We had passed many a mountain village on the way up,
and seen some new kinds of
natives, among them many samples
of the fighting Ghurkas. They are not large men, but
they are strong and resolute.
There are no better soldiers
among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals of
their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the
valley to their
mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs
hitched to their foreheads by a band,
and containing a freightage
weighing—I will not say how many hundreds of pounds,
for the sum is
unbelievable. These were young women, and
they strode smartly along under these
astonishing burdens
with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a
woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the
mountain; and that more than
once a woman had done it. If
these were old women I should regard the Ghurkas as no
more civilized than the Europeans.
At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cabsubstitutes—open
coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne
on men's shoulders up the steep
roads into the town.
Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property
of an indiscriminate and
incoherent landlord, who looks after
nothing, but leaves everything to his army of
Indian servants.
No, he does look after the bill—to be just to
him—and the
tourist cannot do better than follow his example. I was told
by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is often hidden
in the clouds, and
that sometimes a tourist has waited twenty-two
days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of
A CAB SUBSTITUTE
it. And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel
bill he recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in
the Himalayas. But this is probably a lie.
After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was
a comfortable place. It is
loftily situated, and looks out over
a vast spread of scenery; from it you can see where
the boundaries
of three countries come together, some thirty miles away;
Thibet is one of them,
Nepaul another, and I think Herzegovina
was the other. Apparently, in every town and city in
India the gentlemen of the
British civil and military service
have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always
it is pleasant
and homelike. The hotels are not always as good as they
might be, and the stranger
who has access to the Club is grateful
for his privilege and knows how to value it.
Next day was Sunday. Friends came in the gray dawn
with horses, and my party rode away
to a distant point where
Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest show up best, but I stayed at
home for a private view; for it was very old, and I was not
acquainted with the
horses, any way. I got a pipe and a few
blankets and sat for two hours at the window,
and saw the sun
drive away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one
after
another with pale pink splashes and delicate washes of
gold, and finally flood the whole
mighty convulsion of snow-mountains
with a deluge of rich splendors.
Kinchinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between
times it was vividly clear against the sky—away up
there in the blue
dome more than 28,000 feet above sea level
—the loftiest land I had ever
seen, by 12,000 feet or more. It
was 45 miles away. Mount Everest is a thousand feet
higher,
but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up there
before me,
so I did not see it; but I did not care, because I
think that mountains that are as high
as that are disagreeable.
I changed from the back to the front of the house and
MOUNT KINCHINJUNGA.
spent the rest of the morning there, watching the swarthy
strange tribes flock by from their far homes in the Himalayas.
All ages and both sexes were represented, and the breeds were
quite new to me, though the
costumes of the Thibetans made
them look a good deal like
Chinamen. The prayer-wheel
was a frequent feature. It
brought me near to these people,
and made them seem kinfolk of
mine. Through our preacher we
do much of our praying by
proxy. We do not whirl him
around a stick, as they do, but
that is merely a detail. The
swarm swung briskly by, hour
after hour, a strange and striking
pageant. It was wasted there,
and it seemed a pity. It should
have been sent streaming through
the cities of Europe or America, to refresh eyes weary of the
pale monotonies of the circus-pageant. These people were
bound for the bazar, with things to sell. We went down there,
later, and saw that novel congress of the wild peoples, and
plowed here and there through it, and concluded that it would
be worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were no
Kinchinjunga and Everest.
THE PRAYER WHELL.
CHAPTER LVI.
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't
afford it, and when he can.
—Paddn'head Wilson's New Calendar.
Monday and Tuesday at sunrise we again had fair-to-middling
views of the stupendous mountains; then,
being well cooled off and refreshed, we
were ready to
chance the weather of the lower world once more.
We traveled up hill by the regular train five miles to the
summit, then changed to a
little canvas-canopied hand-car for
the 35-mile descent. It was the size of a sleigh, it
had six seats
and was so low that it seemed to rest on the ground. It had
no
engine or other propelling power, and needed none to help
it fly down those steep
inclines. It only needed a strong
brake, to modify its flight, and it had that. There
was a story
of a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little
car by
the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, when the car
jumped the track and threw its
passengers over a precipice.
It was not true, but the story had value for me, for it
made
me nervous, and nervousness wakes a person up and makes
him alive and alert,
and heightens the thrill of a new and
doubtful experience. The car could really jump the
track, of
course; a pebble on the track, placed there by either accident
or
malice, at a sharp curve where one might strike it before
the eye could discover it,
could derail the car and fling it down
into India; and the fact that the
lieutenant-governor had
escaped was no proof that I would have the same luck. And
standing there, looking down upon the Indian Empire from
the airy altitude of 7,000
feet, it seemed unpleasantly far,
dangerously far, to be flung from a hand-car.
But after all, there was but small danger—for me. What
there was, was for
Mr. Pugh, inspector of a division of the
Indian police, in whose company and protection
we had come
from Calcutta. He had seen long service as an artillery officer,
was
less nervous than I was, and so he was to go ahead of us
in a pilot hand-car, with a
Ghurka and another native; and
the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a
precipice we must put on our break and send for another pilot.
It was a good
arrangement. Also Mr. Barnard, chief engineer
of the mountain-division of the road, was
to take personal
charge of our car, and he had been down the mountain in it
many a
time.
Everything looked safe. Indeed, there was but one questionable
detail left: the regular train was to follow us as soon
as we should start, and it
might run over us. Privately, I
thought it would.
The road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing
in and out around the crags and precipices, down,
down, forever down, suggesting
nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably
as a crooked toboggan slide with no end to it.
Mr. Pugh waved his flag and
started, like an arrow from a
bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone
too.
I had previously had but one sensation like the shock of that
departure, and
that was the gaspy shock that took my breath
away the first time that I was discharged
from the summit of
a toboggan slide. But in both instances the sensation was
pleasurable—intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation,
a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable
joy. I
believe that this combination makes the perfection of
human delight.
The pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the
swoop of a swallow that is
skimming the ground, so swiftly
and smoothly and gracefully it swept down the long
straight
WE PLAYED WITH THE TRAIN.
reaches and soared in and out of the bends and around the
corners. We raced after it, and seemed to flash by the capes
and crags with the speed of light; and now and then we
almost overtook it—and had hopes; but it was only playing
with us; when we got near, it released its brake, make a spring
around a corner, and the next time it spun into view, a few
seconds later, it looked as small as a wheelbarrow, it was so far
away. We played with the train in the same way. We often
got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look at the
scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing
roar, and the long coils of the train would come into sight behind
and above us; but we did not need to start till the locomotive
was close down upon us—then we soon left it far
behind. It had to stop at every station, therefore it was not
an embarrassment to us. Our brake was a good piece of
machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as
steep as a house-roof.
The scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there
was no hurry; we could
always stop and examine it. There
was abundance of time. We did not need to hamper the
train; if it wanted the road, we could switch off and let it go
by, then overtake
it and pass it later. We stopped at one
place to see the Gladstone Cliff, a great crag
which the ages
and the weather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of
the
venerable statesman. Mr. Gladstone is a stockholder in
the road, and Nature began this
portrait ten thousand years
ago, with the idea of having the compliment ready in time
for
the event.
We saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems
from branches which were sixty
feet above the ground. That
is, I suppose it was a banyan; its bark resembled that of
the
great banyan in the botanical gardens at Calcutta, that spider-legged
thing with its wilderness of vegetable columns. And
there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree upon
whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson
butterflies had lighted—apparently. In fact these brilliant
red butterflies were flowers, but the illusion was good. Afterward
in South Africa, I saw another splendid effect made by
red flowers. This flower was probably called the torchplant
—should have been so named, anyway. It had a slender stem
several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue of
flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a small
corn-cob. The stems stood three or four feet apart all over a
great hill-slope that was a mile long, and make one think of
what the Place de la Concorde would be if its myriad lights
were red instead of white and yellow.
A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour
to see a Thibetan dramatic
performance. It was in the open
air on the hillside. The audience was composed of
Thibetans,
Ghurkas, and other unusual people. The costumes of the
actors were in
the last degree outlandish, and the performance
was in keeping with the clothes. To an
accompaniment of
barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and
began to spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and
violence, chanting the while,
and soon the whole troupe would
be spinning and chanting and raising the dust. They were
performing an ancient and celebrated historical play, and a
Chinaman explained it
to me in pidjin English as it went
along. The play was obscure enough without the explanation;
with the explanation added, it was opake. As a
drama
this ancient historical work of art was defective, I thought,
but as a wild
and barbarous spectacle the representation was
beyond criticism.
Far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of
remarkable
loop-engineering—a spiral where the road curves
upon itself with such
abruptness that when the regular train
came down and entered the loop, we stood over it and saw the
locomotive disappear under our bridge, then in a few moments
appear again, chasing its own tail; and we saw it gain on it,
overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with
that end of the train. It was like a snake swallowing itself.
Half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at
Mr. Barnard's house for
refreshments, and while we were
sitting on the veranda looking at the distant panorama
of
hills through a gap in the forest, we came very near seeing a
leopard kill a
calf.*
It killed it the day before
It is a wild place and lovely. From thewoods all about came the songs of birds,—among them the
contributions of a couple of birds which I was not then
acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith.
The song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily
rising key, and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity
and severity with each added spiral, growing sharper and
sharper, and more and more painful, more and more agonizing,
more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it
bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's brain,
until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies.
I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They
will be a great curiosity there, and it is believed that in our
climate they will multiply like rabbits.
The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away
has the ring of a sledge on
granite; at a certain other distance
the hammering has a more metallic ring, and you
might think
that the bird was mending a copper kettle; at another distance
it has
a more woodeny thump, but it is a thump that is full of
energy, and sounds just like
starting a bung. So he is a hard
bird to name with a single name; he is a stone-breaker,
coppersmith,
and bung-starter, and even then he is not
completely
named, for when he is close by you find that there is a soft,
THE LOOP.
deep, melodious quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying
name occurs to you. You will not mind his other notes,
but when he camps near enough for you to hear that one, you
presently find that his measured and monotonous repetition of
it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you, soon it
will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your
head; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain
and misery of it, and go crazy. I am bringing some of these
birds home to America. There is nothing like them there.
They will be a great surprise, and it is said that in a climate
like ours they will surpass expectation for fecundity.
I am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls.
I got them in Italy. The song
of the nightingale is the dead
liest known to ornithology. That demoniacal shriek can
kill
at thirty yards. The note of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and
sweet—soft and sweet as the whisper of a flute. But penetrating—oh,
beyond belief; it
can bore through boiler-iron.
It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on the one
unchanging
key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of fifteen
seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night. At first
it is divine; then less
so; then trying; then distressing; then
excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of
two hours the
listener is a maniac.
And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying
down the mountain again;
flying and stopping, flying and
stopping, till at last we were in the plain once more
and stowed
for Calcutta in the regular train. That was the most enjoyable
day I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling,
rapturous pleasure there is
no holiday trip that approaches the
bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car. It has
no
fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five
miles of it instead of five hundred.
CHAPTER LVII.
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you
would call
unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left
undone,
either by man or Nature, to make India the
most extraordinary country that the sun
visits on his
round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
Always, when you think you have come to the end
of her tremendous specialties and have finished hanging tags
upon her as the Land
of the Thug, the Land of the Plague,
the Land of Famine, the Land of Giant Illusions,
the Land of
Studendous Mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops
up and
another tag is required. I have been overlooking the
fact that India is by an
unapproachable supremacy—the Land
of Murderous Wild Creatures. Perhaps it
will be simplest to
throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive
name, as the Land of Wonders.
For many years the British Indian Government has been
trying to destroy the murderous
wild creatures, and has spent
a great deal of money in the effort. The annual official
returns show that the undertaking is a difficult one.
These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results;
the sort of uniformity
which you find in the annual output of
suicides in the world's capitals, and the
proportions of deaths
by this, that, and the other disease. You can always come
close to foretelling how many suicides will occur in Paris,
London, and New York, next
year, and also how many deaths
will result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling
out of
the window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the
statistics of those matters for the present year. In the same
way, with one year's Indian statistics before you, you can
guess closely at how many people were killed in that Empire
by tigers during the previous year, and the year before that,
and the year before that, and at how many were killed in each
of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many
by snakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people
are going to be killed each year for the coming five years by
each of those agencies. You can also guess closely at how
many of each agency the government is going to kill each
year for the next five years.
I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive
years. By these, I know that in India the tiger kills
something over 800 persons
every year, and that the government
responds by killing about double as many tigers every
year. In four of the six
years referred to, the tiger got 800
odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only
700, but in
the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring
917. He
is always sure of his average. Anyone who bets
that the tiger will kill 2,400 people in
India in any three
consecutive years has invested his money in a certainty; anyone
who bets that he will kill 2,600 in any three consecutive
years, is absolutely
sure to lose.
As strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they
are not any more so than
are those of the tiger's annual output
of slaughtered human beings in India. The government's
work is quite uniform, too;
it about doubles the tiger's average.
In six years the tiger
killed 5,000 persons, minus 50; in
the same six years 10,000 tigers were killed, minus
400.
The wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger—700 a
year to
the tiger's 800 odd—but while he is doing it, more
than 5,000 of his tribe
fall.
The leopard kills an average of 230 people per year, but
loses 3,300 of his own mess
while he is doing it.
The bear kills 100 people per year at a cost of 1,250 of his
own tribe.
The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome
fight against man. But it is
nothing to the elephant's fight.
The king of beasts, the lord of the jungle, loses four
of his
mess per year, but he kills forty-five persons to make up
for it.
But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle
is not interested. He
kills but 100 in six years—horses of
hunters, no doubt—but in the
same six the tiger kills more
than 84,000, the leopard 100,000, the bear 4,000, the wolf
70,000, the hyena more than 13,000, other wild beasts 27,000,
and the snakes
19,000, a grand total of more than 300,000; an
average of 50,000 head per year.
In response, the government kills, in the six years, a total
of 3,201,232 wild beasts
and snakes. Ten for one.
It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested
in cattle; they kill only
3,000 odd per year. The snakes are
much more interested in man. India swarms with deadly
snakes. At the head of the list is the cobra, the deadliest
known to the world, a
snake whose bite kills where the rattlesnake's
bite merely entertains.
In India, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform,
as regular, and as
forecastable as are the tiger-average and the
suicide-average. Anyone who bets that in
India, in any three
consecutive years the snakes will kill 49,500 persons, will win
his bet; and anyone who bets that in India in any three consecutive
years, the snakes will kill 53,500 persons, will lose his
bet. In India the snakes
kill 17,000 people a year; they
hardly ever fall short of it; they as seldom exceed it.
An
insurance actuary could take the Indian census tables and the
government's
snake tables and tell you within sixpence how
much it would be worth to insure a man
against death by
snake-bite there. If I had a dollar for every person killed per
year in India, I would rather have it than any other property,
as it is the only property in the world not subject to shrinkage.
I should like to have a royalty on the government-end of
the snake business, too, and
am in London now trying to get
it; but when I get it it is not going to be as regular an
income
as the other will be if I get that; I have applied for it. The
snakes
transact their end of the business in a more orderly and
systematic way than the
government transacts its end of it,
because the snakes have had a long experience and
know all
about the traffic. You can make sure that the government
will never kill
fewer than 110,000 snakes in a year, and that it
will never quite reach
300,000—too much room for oscillation;
good speculative stock, to bear or
bull, and buy and sell long
and short, and all that kind of thing, but not eligible for
investment
like the other. The man that speculates in the government's
snake crop wants to go carefully. I would not advise
a man to buy a single crop at
all—I mean a crop of futures—
for the possible wobble is something
quite extraordinary. If
he can buy six future crops in a bunch,
seller to deliver
1,500,000 altogether, that is another matter. I do not know
what
snakes are worth now, but I know what they would be
worth then, for the statistics show
that the seller could not
come within 427,000 of carrying out his contract. However, I
think that a person who speculates in snakes is a fool, anyway.
He always regrets
it afterwards.
To finish the statistics. In six years the wild beasts kill
20,000 persons, and the
snakes kill 103,000. In the same six
the government kills 1,073,546 snakes. Plenty left.
There are narrow escapes in India. In the very jungle
where I killed sixteen tigers
and all those elephants, a cobra
bit me but it got well; everyone was surprised. This
could
not happen twice in ten years, perhaps. Usually death would
result in
fifteen minutes.
We struck out westward or northwestward from Calcutta
on an itinerary of a zig-zag
sort, which would in the course of
time carry us across India to its northwestern corner
and the
border of Afghanistan. The first part of the trip carried us
through a
great region which was an endless garden—miles
and miles of the beautiful
flower from whose juices comes the
opium, and at Muzaffurpore we were in the midst of
the indigo
culture; thence by a branch road to the Ganges at a point
near
Dinapore, and by a train which would have missed the
connection by a week but for the
thoughtfulness of some
British officers who were along, and who knew the ways of
trains that are run by natives without white supervision.
This train stopped at every
village; for no purpose connected
with business, apparently. We put out nothing, we took
nothing aboard. The train hands stepped ashore and gossiped
with friends a quarter
of an hour, then pulled out and repeated
this at the succeeding villages. We had
thirty-five miles to go
and six hours to do it in, but it was plain that we were not
going to make it. It was then that the English officers said it
was now necessary
to turn this gravel train into an express.
So they gave the engine-driver a rupee and
told him to fly.
It was a simple remedy. After that we made ninety miles an
hour.
We crossed the Ganges just at dawn, made our connection,
and went to Benares, where we stayed twenty-four hours
and inspected that strange and
fascinating piety-hive again;
then left for Lucknow, a city which is perhaps the most
conspicuous
of the many monuments of British fortitude and valor
that are scattered about the
earth.
The heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass,
and baked dry by the
sun they were the color of pale dust,
which was flying in clouds. But it was much hotter
than
this when the relieving forces marched to Lucknow in the time
of the Mutiny.
Those were the days of 138° in the shade.
CHAPTER LVIII.
Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is
the
golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes
from which the Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was
the annexation of the kingdom of
Oudh by the East India
Company—characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as "the
most unrighteous act that was ever committed." In the
spring of 1857, a mutinous
spirit was observable in many of
the native garrisons, and it grew day by day and spread
wider
and wider. The younger military men saw something very
serious in it, and
would have liked to take hold of it vigorously
and stamp it out promptly; but they were
not in authority.
Old men were in the high places of the army—men who
should have been retired long before, because of their great
age—and they
regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence.
They
loved their native soldiers, and would not
believe that anything could move them to
revolt. Everywhere
these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the rumbling
of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.
And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their
own way. They moved from camp to
camp undisturbed, and
painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering
at the hands of the English, and made his heart burn for
revenge. They were able
to point to two facts of formidable
value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's
day, native
armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms;
therefore, they were weak against Clive's organized handful of
well-armed men, but the thing was the other way, now. The
British forces were native; they had been trained by the
British, organized by the British, armed by the British, all the
power was in their hands—they were a club made by British
hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to
oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British
soldiers scattered about India, a force not worth speaking
of. This argument, taken alone, might not have succeeded,
for the bravest and best Indian troops had a wholesome dread
of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong; but the
agitators backed it with their second and best point— prophecy —a
prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to
prophecy at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but
not prophecy. There was a prophecy that a hundred years
from the year of that battle of Clive's which founded the
British Indian Empire, the British power would be overthrown
and swept away by the natives.
The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857,
and fired a train of
tremendous historical explosions. Nana
Sahib's massacre of the surrendered garrison of
Cawnpore
occurred in June, and the long siege of Lucknow began. The
military
history of England is old and great, but I think it
must be granted that the crushing of
the Mutiny is the greatest
chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared.
They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean
of hostile
populations. It would take months to inform England
and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the
odds, but with English
resolution and English devotion they
took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it,
through
good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising
fight that one may
read of in fiction or out of it, and won it
thoroughly.
The Mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such
rapidity that there was but
little time for occupants of weak
outlying stations to escape to places of safety.
Attempts were
made, of course, but they were attended by hardships as bitter
as
death in the few cases which were successful; for the heat
ranged between 120 and 138 in
the shade; the way led through
hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be
had.
For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and
plenty, such a
journey must have been a cruel experience.
Sir G. O. Trevelyan quotes an example:
"This is what befell Mrs. M——, the wife of the surgeon at a certain
station on the southern confines of the insurrection. 'I heard,' she says, 'a
number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw my husband driving furiously
from the
mess-house, waving his whip. I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer
with my child in his
arms, I caught her up, and got into the buggy. At the
mess-house we found all the
officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys,
who had remained faithful. We went off
in one large party, amidst a general
conflagration of our late homes. We reached the
caravanserai at Chattapore
the next morning, and thence started for Callinger. At this
point our sepoy
escort deserted us. We were fired upon by matchlockmen, and one officer
was
shot dead. We heard, likewise, that the people had risen at Callinger, so we
returned and walked back ten miles that day. M—— and I carried the child
alternately. Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food
amongst us.
An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The
Major died, and was buried;
also the Sergeant-major and some women. The
bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June.
We were fired at again by matchlockmen,
and changed
direction for Allahabad. Our party consisted of nine
gentlemen, two children, the
sergeant and his wife. On the morning of the
twentieth, Captain Scott took Lottie on to
his horse. I was riding behind my
husband, and she was so crushed between us. She was
two years old on the
first of the month. We were both weak through want of food and the
effect
of the sun. Lottie and I had no head covering. M——had a
sepoy's cap I
found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by villagers
armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain Scott's horse on
the leg.
He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor husband never saw his
child again. We rode on
several miles, keeping away from villages, and then
crossed the river. Our thirst was
extreme. M——had dreadful cramps, so
that I had to hold him on the
horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day
before I saw the drummer's wife eating
chupatties, and asked her to give a
piece to the child, which she did. I now saw water
in a ravine. The
descent was steep, and our only drinking-vessel was
M——'s cap. Our horse
got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no
stockings, and my feet were torn
and blistered. Two peasants came in sight, and we were
frightened and rode
off. The sergeant held our horse, and M——put me up and mounted. I think
he must have got suddenly faint, for I fell and he over me, on the road, when
the horse started off. Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he
could not live many hours I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine.
He told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave. My
brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the sergeant let
go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut off. We sat down on
the ground waiting for death. Poor fellow! he was very weak; his thirst
was frightful, and I went to get him water. Some villagers came, and took
my rupees and watch. I took off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my
hair, and replaced the guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water
in, but was no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and,
though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his mouth, it
only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again. I held him in my
arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic, but could not cry. I was
alone. I bound his head and face in my dress, for there was no earth to bury
him. The pain in my hands and feet was dreadful. I went down to the
ravine, and sat in the water on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for
Lottie. When I came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken
her little watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an
hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the ravine, and
took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They then dragged me to a
village, mocking me all the way, and disputing as to whom I was to belong
to. The whole population came to look at me I asked for a bedstead, and
lay down outside the door of a hut. They had a dozen of cows, and yet
refused me milk. When night came, and the village was quiet, some old
woman brought me a leafful of rice. I was too parched to eat, and they
gave me water. The morning after a neighboring Rajah sent a palanquin
and a horseman to fetch me, who told me that a little child and three Sahibs
had come to his master's house. And so the poor mother found her lost one,
'greatly blistered,' poor little creature. It is not for Europeans in India to
pray that their flight be not in the winter."
In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh
Wheeler commanding the forces at
Cawnpore, was deserted by
his native troops; then he moved out of the fort and into an
exposed patch of open flat ground and built a four-foot mud
wall around it. He had
with him a few hundred white
soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and
children
than soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short
of
ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything
but courage and devotion to
duty. The defense of that open
lot through twenty-one days and nights of hunger, thirst,
Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of bullets, bombs, and
cannon-balls—a defense conducted, not by the aged and infirm
general, but by a young officer named Moore—is one of the
most heroic episodes in history. When at last the Nana found
it impossible to conquer these starving men and women with
powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded.
He agreed to supply them with food and send them to
Allahabad in boats. Their mud wall and their barracks were
in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion, they
had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered an
honorable compromise, their forces had been fearfully reduced
by casualties and by disease, they were not able to continue
the contest longer. They came forth helpless but suspecting
no treachery, the Nana's host closed around them, and at a
signal from a trumpet the massacre began. About two
hundred women and children were spared—for the present—
but all the men except three or four were killed. Among the
incidents of the massacre quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is
this:
"When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to outnumber
the living;—when the fire slackened, as the marks grew few and far
between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the right of the temple
plunged into
the river, sabre between teeth, and pistol in hand. Thereupon
two half-caste Christian
women, the wives of musicians in the band of the
Fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which
should not be related at second-hand.
'In the boat where I was to have gone,' says Mrs.
Bradshaw, confirmed
throughout by Mrs. Setts, 'was the school-mistress and twenty-two
misses.
General Wheeler came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water
near the boat. I stood close by. He said, 'Carry me a little further towards
the boat.'
But a trooper said, 'No, get out here.' As the General got out of
the palkee,
headforemost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword into the
neck, and he fell into
the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it;
alas! alas! Some were stabbed with
bayonets; others cut down. Little infants
were torn in pieces. We saw it; we did; and tell you only what we
saw. Other
children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The schoolgirls
were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire. In the
water, a few
paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of
Colonel Williams. A sepoy
was going to kill her with his bayonet. She
said, 'My father was always kind to sepoys.'
He turned away, and just
then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she
fell into the water
These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrieff, the clergyman, take a
book
from his pocket that he never had leisure to open, and heard him commence
a prayer for mercy which he was not permitted to conclude. Another deponent
observed an European making for a drain like a scared water-rat,
when some boatmen, armed with cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him
down dead into the mud."
The women and children who had been reserved from the
massacre were imprisoned during
a fortnight in a small building,
one story
high—a cramped place, a slightly modified
Black Hole of Calcutta. They were
waiting in suspense;
there was none who could forecaste their fate. Meantime the
news of the massacre had traveled far and an army of rescuers
with Havelock at its head
was on its way—at least an army
which hoped to be rescuers. It was crossing
the country by
forced marches, and strewing its way with its own dead—
men struck down by cholera, and by a heat which reached
135°. It was in a
vengeful fury, and it stopped for nothing—
neither heat, nor fatigue, nor
disease, nor human opposition.
It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning
victory
after victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to
count results. And at
last, after this extraordinary march, it
arrived before the walls of Cawnpore, met the
Nana's massed
strength, delivered a crushing defeat, and entered.
But too late—only a few hours too late. For at the last
moment the Nana had
decided upon the massacre of the
captive women and children, and had commissioned three
Mohammedans and two Hindoos to do the work. Sir G. O.
Trevelyan says:
"Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of Hindostan—the
hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who had accosted
the officer was
standing in the doorway. With her were the native doctor
and two Hindoo menials. That
much of the business might be seen from the
veranda, but all else was concealed amidst
the interior gloom. Shrieks and
scuffling acquainted those without that the journeymen
were earning their
hire. Survur Khan soon emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt.
He
procured another from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared
again
on the same errand. The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps
the thick of the
work was already over. By the time darkness had closed in,
the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then the screams
ceased, but the groans lasted till morning.
"The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours the
five repaired to
the scene of their labors over night. They were attended by
a few sweepers, who
proceeded to transfer the contents of the house to a dry
well situated behind some trees
which grew hard by. 'The bodies,' says one
who was present throughout, 'were dragged
out, most of them by the hair of
the head. Those who had clothing worth taking were
stripped. Some of the
women were alive. I cannot say how many; but three could speak. They
prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to
their sufferings. I
remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely
wounded in
both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or three others were
placed against the bank of the cut by which bullocks go down in drawing
water. The dead
were first thrown in. Yes: there was a great crowd looking
on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. They were
principally city
people and villagers. Yes: there were also sepoys. Three
boys were
alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been
six or seven,
and the youngest five years. They were running around the
well (where else
could they go to?), and there was none to save them. No:
none said a word or
tried to save them.'
"At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get away.
The little
thing had been frightened past bearing by the murder of one of the
surviving ladies. He
thus attracted the observation of a native who flung
him and his companions down the
well."
The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost
without rest, to save the women
and the children, and now
they were too late—all were dead and the assassin
had flown.
What happened then, Trevelyan hesitated to put into words.
"Of what
took place, the less said is the better."
Then he continues:
"But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much. Those
who, straight
from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms
of the ladies' house, saw
what it were well could the outraged earth have
straightway hidden. The inner apartment
was ankle-deep in blood. The
plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not high up as where
men have fought,
but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to
avoid
the blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified
the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of
keeping out
the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's
trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or
two
shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerreotype cases with
cracked glasses. An
officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard,
and marked 'Ned's hair, with love'; but around were strewn locks,
some near a yard
in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other
scissors."
The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June,
1815. I do not state this fact
as a reminder to the reader, but
as news to him. For a forgotten fact is news when it comes
again. Writers of books have the fashion of whizzing by
vast
and renowned historical events with the remark, "The details
of this
tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to
need repeating here." They know
that that is not true. It is
a low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten
every detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous
event is left in his mind
but a vague and formless luminous
smudge. Aside from the desire to flatter the reader,
they
have another reason for making the remark—two reasons,
indeed.
They do not remember the details themselves, and do
not want the trouble of hunting them
up and copying them
out; also, they are afraid that if they search them out and
print them they will be scoffed at by the book-reviewers for
retelling those worn old
things which are familiar to everybody.
They should not
mind the reviewer's jeer; he doesn't
remember any of the worn old
things until the book which he
is reviewing has retold them to him.
I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and
another, but I was not doing it
to flatter the reader; I was
merely doing it to save work. If I had known the details
without
brushing up, I would have put them in; but I didn't, and
I did not want the labor
of posting myself; so I said, "The
details of this tremendous episode are too familiar
to the reader
to need repeating here." I do not like that kind of a lie; still,
it
does save work.
I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the
Siege of Lucknow in fear of
the reviewer; I am not leaving
them out in fear that they would not interest the reader;
I am
leaving them out partly to save work; mainly for lack of room.
It is a pity,
too; for there is not a dull place anywhere in the
great story.
Ten days before the outbreak (May 10th) of the Mutiny,
all was
serene at Lucknow, the huge capital of Oudh, the Kingdom
which had recently been seized by the India Company.
There was a great garrison,
composed of about 7,000 native
troops and between 700 and 800 whites. These white
soldiers
and their families were probably the only people of their race
there; at
their elbow was that swarming population of warlike
natives, a race of born soldiers,
brave, daring, and fond of
fighting. On high ground just outside the city stood the
palace of that great personage, the Resident, the representative
of British power
and authority. It stood in the midst of
spacious grounds, with its due complement of
outbuildings,
and the grounds were enclosed by a wall—a wall not for
defense, but for privacy. The mutinous spirit was in the air,
but the whites were not
afraid, and did not feel much
troubled.
Then came the outbreak at Meerut, then the capture of
Delhi by the mutineers; in June
came the three-weeks
leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler in his open lot at Cawnpore—
40 miles distant from Lucknow—then the treacherous massacre
of that gallant little garrison; and now the great revolt
was in full flower, and
the comfortable condition of things at
Lucknow was instantly changed.
There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence
marched out of the Residency on
the 30th of June to put it
down, but was defeated with heavy loss, and had difficulty in
getting back again. That night the memorable siege of the
Residency—called the siege of Lucknow—began. Sir Henry
was killed
three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him
in command.
Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of
hostile and confident native
besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal
native soldiers, 730 white ones, and 500 women and
children.
In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper
themselves sufficiently with women and children.
The natives established themselves in houses close at hand
and began to rain bullets
and cannon-balls into the Residency;
and this they kept up, night and day, during four
months and
a half, the little garrison industriously replying all the time.
The
women and children soon became so used to the roar of
the guns that it ceased to disturb
their sleep. The children
imitated siege and defense in their play. The
women—with
any pretext, or with none—would sally out into the storm-swept
grounds.
The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn
fortitude, in the midst of
death, which came in many forms—
by bullet, small-pox, cholera, and by
various diseases induced
by unpalatable and insufficient food, by the long hours of
wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and nightly
battle in the oppressive
Indian heat, and by the broken rest
caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies,
mice, rats,
and fleas.
Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half
of the original force of white soldiers was dead, and close
upon three-fifths of
the original native force.
But the fighting went on just the same. The enemy
mined, the English counter-mined,
and, turn about, they blew
up each other's posts. The Residency grounds were honeycombed
with the enemy's tunnels. Deadly courtesies were
constantly
exchanged—sorties by the English in the night;
rushes by the enemy in the
night—rushes whose purpose was
to breach the walls or scale them; rushes
which cost heavily,
and always failed.
The ladies got used to all the horrors of war—the shrieks
of mutilated men,
the sight of blood and death. Lady Inglis
makes this mention in her diary:
WHERE THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN LODGED.
"Mrs. Bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in the
eye To extract
the bullet it was found necessary to take out the eye—a
fearful operation.
Her mistress held her while it was performed."
The first relieving force failed to relieve. It was under
Havelock and Outram, and
arrived when the siege had been
going on for three months. It fought its desperate way
to
Lucknow, then fought its way through the city against odds of
a hundred to one,
and entered the Residency; but there was
not enough left of it, then, to do any good. It
lost more men
in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in.
It
became captive itself.
The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease
went steadily on. Both
sides fought with energy and industry.
Captain Birch puts this striking incident in
evidence. He is
speaking of the third month of the siege:
"As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position this
month may be
mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a brick
building simply by musketry firing. This building was in a most exposed
position. All
the shots which just missed the top of the rampart cut into the
dead wall pretty much in
a straight line, and at length cut right through and
brought the upper story tumbling
down. The upper structure on the top of
the brigade-mess also fell in. The Residency
house was a wreck. Captain
Anderson's post had long ago been knocked down, and Innes'
post also fell
in. These two were riddled with round shot. As many as 200 were picked
up by Colonel Masters."
The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the
next
month—October. Then, November 2d, news came—
Sir Colin Campbell's
relieving force would soon be on its way
from Cawnpore.
On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard.
On the 13th the sounds came nearer—he was slowly, but
steadily, cutting his
way through, storming one stronghold
after another.
On the 14th he captured the Martiniere College, and ran up
the British flag there. It
was seen from the Residency.
Next he took the Dilkoosha.
On the 17th he took the former mess-house of the 32d
regiment—a fortified
building, and very strong. "A most
exciting, anxious day," writes Lady Inglis in her
diary.
"About 4 P.M., two strange officers walked through our yard,
leading their
horses"—and by that sign she knew that communication
was established between the forces, that the relief
was real, this time, and that
the long siege of Lucknow was
ended.
The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march
was through seas of blood.
The weapon mainly used was the
bayonet, the fighting was desperate. The way was milestoned
with detached strong buildings of stone, fortified, and
heavily garrisoned, and
these had to be taken by assault.
Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it.
At the
Secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied
a great stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter
was continued until every
man was killed. That is a sample
of the character of that devastating march.
There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and
from the Residency the
progress of the march, step by step,
victory by victory, could be noted; the ascending
clouds of
battle-smoke marked the way to the eye, and the thunder of
the guns
marked it to the ear.
Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it,
but to save the occupants of
the Residency, and bring them
away. Four or five days after his arrival the secret evacuation
by the troops took place, in the middle of a dark night,
by the principal gate
(the Bailie Guard). The two hundred
women and two hundred and fifty
children had been previously
removed. Captain Birch says:
"And now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and
successful
generalship—the withdrawal of the whole of the various forces, a
combined
movement requiring the greatest care and skill. First, the garrison
in immediate contact with the enemy at the furthest extremity of the
THE BAILIE GUARD GATE.
Residency position was marched out. Every other garrison in turn fell in
behind it, and so passed out through the Bailie Guard gate, till the whole of
our position was evacuated. Then Havelock's force was similarly withdrawn,
post by post, marching in rear of our garrison. After them in turn
came the forces of the Commander-in-Chief, which joined on in the rear of
Havelock's force. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with the utmost
order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the movement of a
telescope. Stern silence was kept, and the enemy took no alarm."
Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to General Sir
James Outram, sets down the
closing detail of this impressive
midnight retreat, in darkness and by stealth, of this
shadowy
host through the gate which it had defended so long and so
well:
"At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram remaining
till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to the Bailie
Guard, the
scene of as noble a defense as I think history will ever have to
relate."
RUINS OF THE RESIDENCY.
CHAPTER LIX.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you
have
ceased to live.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a
British
officer, and when I arrived at the Residency
I was so familiar with the road that I
could have led a
retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has been
out
of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the
battered Bailie Guard and
turned about to review the march
and imagine the relieving forces storming their way
along it,
everything was upside down and wrong end first in a moment,
and I was
never able to get straightened out again. And
now, when I look at the battle-plan, the
confusion remains.
In me the east was born west, the battle-plans which have the
east on the right-hand side are of no use to me.
The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and
are impressive and beautiful.
They and the grounds are
sacred now, and will suffer no neglect nor be profaned by any
sordid or commercial use while the British remain masters of
India. Within the
grounds are buried the dead who gave up
their lives there in the long siege.
After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that
raged night and day over
the place during so many months,
and after a fashion I could imagine the men moving
through
it, but I could not satisfactorily place the 200 women, and I
could do
nothing at all with the 250 children. I knew by
THE RESIDENCY GATEWAY.
Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their small
affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and
thunder of a siege were natural and proper features of nursery
life, and I tried to realize it; but when her little Johnny came
rushing, all excitement, through the din and smoke, shouting,
"Oh, mamma, the white hen has laid an egg!" I saw that I
could not do it. Johnny's place was under the bed. I could
imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there; and
I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying
an egg; my interest would have been with the parties that
were laying the bombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those
children in the Club's Indian palace, and I knew that all
through the siege he was perfecting his teething and learning
to talk; and while to me he was the most impressive object
in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able to imagine
what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of
his, nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to
him to be marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world
where there wasn't any noise, and nothing going on. He was
only forty-one when I saw him, a strangely youthful link to
connect the present with so ancient an episode as the Great
Mutiny.
By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was
the scene of Moore's memorable
defense, and the spot on the
shore of the Ganges where the massacre of the betrayed garrison
occurred, and the small Indian temple whence the bugle-signal
notified the assassins to fall on. This latter was a
lonely spot, and silent. The
sluggish river drifted by, almost
currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels
with
vast sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and
the only living
thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn
bald-headed bird, the Adjutant, standing on
his six-foot stilts,
solitary on a distant bar, with his head sunk between his
shoulders, thinking; thinking of his prize, I suppose—the
dead Hindoo that
lay awash at his feet, and whether to eat
him alone or invite friends. He and his prey
were a proper
accent to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it,
they
emphasized its loneliness and its solemnity.
And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless
women and children, and also the
costly memorial that is built
over the well which contains their remains. The Black Hole
of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent age is come, and
whatever remembrancer
still exists of the moving and heroic
sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of
Lucknow and
Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.
In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we
saw forts, mosques, and
tombs, which were built in the great
days of the Mohammedan emperors, and which are
marvels of
cost, magnitude, and richness of materials and ornamentation,
creations
of surpassing grandeur, wonders which do indeed
make the like things in the rest of the
world seem tame and
inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to
describe
them. By good fortune I had not read too much
about them, and therefore was able to get
a natural and
rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled,
blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated
my imagination by drinking
too much pestilential literary
hot Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and
sorrow.
I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned
buildings, the Taj Mahal, the
most celebrated construction in
the earth. I had read a great deal too much about it. I
saw
it in the daytime, I saw it in the moonlight, I saw it near at
hand, I saw it
from a distance; and I knew all the time, that
of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no competitor
now and no possible future competitor;
and yet, it was not
my Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people;
it
was solidly lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.
I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions
of the Taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions
left in his mind. These
descriptions do really state the truth
—as nearly as the limitations of
language will allow. But
language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it
can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they
will not inflate the
facts—by help of the reader's imagination,
which is always ready to take a
hand, and work for nothing,
and do the bulk of it at that.
I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little
local guide-book of Mr.
Satya Chandra Mukerji. I take them
from here and there in his description:
"The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to be
found on all
sides on the surface of the marble evince a most delicate touch."
That is true.
"The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the
petals, and the
lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole of the civilized
world."
"The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest perfection
in the Taj."
Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all
sides. What do you see
before you? Is the fairy structure
growing? Is it becoming a jewel casket?
"The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally sublime
and beautiful."
Then Sir William Wilson Hunter:
"The Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble,' rises on
the river
bank."
"The materials are white marble and red sandstone."
"The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the workmanship
baffle description."
Sir William continues. I will italicize some of his words:
"The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose
corners rises a
tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and of exquisite
beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one of which is
itself a mosque
of great architectural merit. In the center of the whole design
the mausoleum occupies a square of 186 feet, with the angles deeply
truncated so
as to form an unequal octagon. The main feature in this central
pile is the great dome, which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere
and
tapers at its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent.
Beneath it an
enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the
princess and of her husband,
the Emperor. Each corner of the mausoleum is
covered by a similar though much smaller
dome erected on a pediment pierced
with graceful Saracenic arches. Light is admitted
into the interior through a
double screen of pierced marble, which tempers the glare of
an Indian sky
while its whiteness prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into
gloom.
The internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious
stones, such as agate,
jasper, etc., with which every squandril or salient point in the
architecture is
richly fretted. Brown and violet marble is also freely employed in
wreaths,
scrolls, and lintels to relieve the monotony of white wall. In regard to color
and design, the interior of the Taj may rank first in the world for
purely decorative
workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen can
never
be forgotten, nor the aärial grace of its domes, rising like marble bubbles
into the clear sky. The Taj represents the most highly elaborated stage
of
ornamentation reached by the Indo-Mohammedan builders, the stage in
which the architect
ends and the jeweler begins. In its magnificent gateway
the
diagonal ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the
gateways of
Itimad-ud-doulah and Sikandra mausoleums is superseded by
fine marble cables, in bold
twists, strong and handsome. The triangular
insertions of white marble and large flowers
have in like manner given place
to fine inlaid work. Firm
perpendicular lines in black marble with well proportioned
panels of the same material are effectively used in the interior of the
gateway.
On its top the Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of
Sikandra are replaced by
Moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red
sandstone, in the Kiosks and
pavilions which adorn the roof. From the pillared
pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below, with
the noble
Jumna river at their farther end, and the city and fort of Agra in
the distance. From
this beautiful and splendid gateway one passes up a
straight alley shaded by evergreen
trees cooled by a broad shallow piece of
water running along the middle of the path to
the Taj itself. The Taj is
entirely of marble and gems. The red
sandstone of the other Mohammedan
buildings has entirely disappeared, or rather the red
sandstone which used to
form the thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid
completely with
white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid
with precious stones arranged
in lovely patterns of flowers. A feeling of purity
impresses itself on the eye
and the mind from the absence of the coarser material which
forms so invariable
a material in Agra architecture. The lower wall and panels are covered
with
tulips, oleanders, and full-blown lilies, in flat carving on the white marble;
and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant when
looked at closely, there is on the whole but little color, and the
all-prevailing
sentiment is one of whiteness, silence, and calm. The whiteness is broken
only by the fine color of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by
delicately written inscriptions, also in black, from the Koran. Under the dome
of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in white
marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the emperor and
his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving has advanced from the
old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of flowers and foliage, handled with
great freedom and spirit. The two cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite
enclosure have no carving except the plain Kalamdan or oblong pen-box on
the tomb of Emperor Shah Jehan. But both cenotaphs are inlaid with
flowers made of costly gems,and with the ever graceful oleander scroll."
Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes
on to say:
"On both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle
their foliage; the
song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of roses and
lemon flowers sweetens the air.
Down such a vista and over such a foreground
rises the Taj. There is no mystery, no sense of partial failure about
the Taj. A
thing of perfect beauty and of absolute finish in every detail, it
might pass for the work of genii who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills
with
which mankind are beset."
All of these details are true. But, taken together, they
state a
falsehood—to you. You cannot add them up correctly.
Those writers know the values of their words and phrases, but
to you the words and
phrases convey other and uncertain
values. To those writers their phrases have values
which I
think I am now acquainted with; and for the help of the
reader I will here
repeat certain of those words and phrases,
and follow them with numerals which shall
represent those
values—then we shall see the difference between a writer's
ciphering and a mistaken reader's:
Precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc.—5.
With which every salient point is richly fretted—5.
First in the world for purely decorative workmanship—9.
The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the
jeweler begins—5.
The Taj is entirely of marble and gems—7.
Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers—5.
The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant—
(followed by a most important modification which the reader
is sure to
read too carelessly)—2.
The vast mausoleum—5.
This marvel of marble—5.
The exquisite enclosure—5.
Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems—5.
A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish—5.
Those details are correct; the figures which I have placed
after them represent quite
fairly their individual values.
Then why, as a whole, do they convey a false impression
to
the reader? It is because the reader—beguiled by his heated
imagination—masses them in the wrong way. The writer
would mass the first three figures in the following way, and
they would speak the
truth:
But the reader masses them thus—and then they tell a lie
—559.
The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together,
and then the sum would
express the whole truth about the Taj,
and the truth only—63.
But the reader—always helped by his imagination—
would put the
figures in a row one after the other, and get this
sum, which would tell him a noble big
lie:
559575255555.
You must put in the commas yourself; I have to go on
with my work.
The reader will always be sure to put the figures together
in that wrong way, and then
as surely before him will stand,
sparkling in the sun, a gem-crusted Taj tall as the
Matterhorn.
I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in
getting my imaginary Falls
gauged to the actuality and could
begin to sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for
what they
were, not what I hassd expected them to be. When I first approached
THE TAJ MAHAL.
AN EXAGGERATED NIAGARA.
them it was with my face lifted toward the sky, for
I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean pouring down
thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wall
of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the
toy reality came suddenly into view—that beruffled little wet
apron hanging out to dry—the shock was too much for me,
and I fell with a dull thud.
Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits,
the proportions
adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at
last to realize that a waterfall a
hundred and sixty-five feet
high and a quarter of a mile wide was an impressive thing.
It
was not a dipperful to my vanished great vision, but it would
answer.
I know that I ought to do with the Taj as I was obliged to
do with
Niagara—see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually
get rid of the Taj built in it by its describers, by help of
my imagination, and
substitute for it the Taj of fact. It
would be noble and fine, then, and a marvel; not
the marvel
which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fine enough. I am a
careless
reader, I suppose—an impressionist reader; an impressionist
reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a
reader
who overlooks the informing details or masses their
sum improperly, and gets only a
large splashy, general effect
—an effect which is not correct, and which is
not warranted
by the particulars placed before me—particulars which I did
not examine, and whose meanings I did not cautiously and
carefully estimate. It is
an effect which is some thirty-five or
forty times finer than the reality, and is
therefore a great deal
better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I ought
never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and
thus preserve undamaged
my own private mighty Niagara
tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my own ineffable
Taj,
built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows supported
by colonnades of moonlight. It is a mistake for a person with
an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious
world's wonder.
I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea
that the Taj's place in the
achievements of man was exactly
the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of
Nature; that
the Taj represented man's supremest possibility in the creation
of
grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the
ice-storm represents
Nature's supremest possibility in the combination
of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago
that idea was bred in me, but
I know that I cannot remember
back to a time when the thought of either of these symbols
of
gracious and unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest
the other. If I
thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before
me divinely beautiful; if I thought of the
Taj, with its encrustings
and inlayings of jewels, the vision of the ice-storm
rose. And so, to me, all
these years, the Taj has had no rival
among the temples and palaces of men, none that
even remotely
approached it—it was man's architectural ice-storm.
Here in London the other night I was talking with some
Scotch and English friends, and
I mentioned the ice-storm,
using it as a figure—a figure which failed, for
none of them
had heard of the ice-storm. One gentleman, who was very
familiar with
American literature, said he had never seen it
mentioned in any book. That is strange.
And I, myself, was
not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and
yet
the autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has
received full and competent
attention.
The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an
event. And it is not an
event which one is careless about.
When it comes, the news flies from room to room in
the
house, there are bangings on the doors, and shoutings, "The
ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest sleepers throw
off the covers and join the rush for the windows. The ice-storm
occurs in mid-winter, and usually its enchantments are
wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. A
fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs
and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. In time
the trunk and every branch and twig are incased in hard pure
ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree made all of
glass—glass that is crystal-clear. All along the under side of
every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles—the frozen
drip. Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to
icicles, but are round beads—frozen tears.
The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure
atmosphere and a sky without
a shred of cloud in it—and
everything is still, there is not a breath of
wind. The dawn
breaks and spreads, the news of the storm goes about the
house, and
the little and the big, in wraps and blankets, flock
to the window and press together
there, and gaze intently out
upon the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says
a
word, nobody stirs. All are waiting; they know what is
coming, and they are
waiting—waiting for the miracle. The
minutes drift on and on and on, with not
a sound but the
ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf of
rays
into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of
glittering diamonds.
Everybody catches his breath, and feels
a swelling in his throat and a moisture in his
eyes—but waits
again; for he knows what is coming; there is more yet. The
sun climbs higher, and still higher, flooding the tree from its
loftiest spread of
branches to its lowest, turning it to a glory of
white fire; then in a moment, without
warning, comes the
great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle without its fellow
in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and twig
to swaying, and in an
instant turns the whole white tree into a
spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every
conceivable color; and there it stands and sways this way and
that, flash! flash! flash! a dancing and glancing world of
rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, the most radiant spectacle,
the most blinding spectacle, the divinest, the most exquisite,
the most intoxicating vision of fire and color and
intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has
rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the
gates of heaven.
By all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the ice-storm
is Nature's supremest achievement in the domain of the
superb and the beautiful;
and by my reason, at least, I know
that the Taj is man's ice-storm.
In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant
from twig and branch is an
individual gem, and changes color
with every motion caused by the wind; each tree
carries a
million, and a forest-front exhibits the splendors of the single
tree
multiplied by a thousand.
It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm
put upon canvas, and have not
heard that any painter has tried
to do it. I wonder why that is. Is it that paint cannot
counterfeit
the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel? There should
be, and must be, a reason,
and a good one, why the most
enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglected
by the brush.
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell
the strict truth. The
describers of the Taj have used the word
gem in its strictest sense—its scientific sense. In that
sense it
is a mild word, and promises but little to the eye—nothing
bright, nothing brilliant, nothing sparkling, nothing splendid in
the way of color. It
accurately describes the sober and unobtrusive
gem-work of the Taj; that is, to the very highly-educated
one person in a thousand; but it most falsely describes
it to the 999. But the 999 are the people who ought to be especially
taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored
designs wrought in carnelians, or agates, or such
things; they know the word in its wide and ordinary sense
only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies and opals
and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in
print they see a vision of glorious colors clothed in fire.
These describers are writing for the "general," and so, in
order to make sure of being
understood, they ought to use
words in their ordinary sense, or else explain. The word
fountain means one thing in Syria, where there
is but a handful
of people; it means quite another thing in North America,
where there are
75,000,000. If I were describing some Syrian
scenery, and should exclaim, "Within the
narrow space of a
quarter of a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding
moonlight, two hundred noble fountains—imagine the spectacle!"
the North American would have a vision of clustering
columns
of water soaring aloft, bending over in graceful arches,
bursting in beaded spray and
raining white fire in the moonlight—and
he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not
be deceived; he would merely see
two hundred fresh-water
springs—two hundred drowsing puddles, as level and
unpretentious
and unexcited as so many door-mats, and even with
the help of the moonlight he
would not lose his grip in the
presence of the exhibition. My word "fountain" would be
correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey
the strict truth to
the handful of Syrians, and the strictest
misinformation to the North American millions.
With their
gems—and gems—and more gems—and gems
again—and
still other gems—the describers of the Taj are within
their
legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest
scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration
in telling "what
ain't so."
CHAPTER LX.
(impatiently) to . The trouble with you Chicago people is,
that you think you are the
best people down here; whereas you are merely the most
numerous.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
wandered contentedly around here and there in
India; to
Lahore, among other places, where the
Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This
hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation.
It was a fine
elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I
was not afraid of it. I even rode it
with confidence through
the crowded lanes of the native city, where it scared all the
horses out of their senses, and where children were always
just escaping its feet.
It took the middle of the road in a fine
independent way, and left it to the world to
get out of the
way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid of
collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an
elephant that feeling is
absent. I could have ridden in comfort
through a regiment of runaway teams. I could easily
learn to prefer an elephant to
any other vehicle, partly because
of that immunity from collisions, and partly because
of the
fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity
one feels in that high place, and partly because one can
look in at the windows
and see what is going on privately
among the family. The Lahore horses were used to
elephants,
but they were rapturously afraid of them just the same. It
seemed
curious. Perhaps the better they know the elephant
the more they respect him in that
peculiar way. In our own
case we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted
with it.
We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan
frontier—I think it
was the Afghan frontier, but it may have
been Hertzegovina—it was around
there somewhere—and
down again to Delhi, to see the ancient architectural
wonders
there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and also to see
the scene of
the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days, when
the British carried Delhi by storm,
one of the marvels of history
for impudent daring and immortal valor.
We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old
mansion which possessed
historical interest. It was built by
a rich Englishman who had become
orientalized—so much
so that he had a zenana. But he was a broad-minded man,
and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque; to
please himself he built
an English church. That kind of a
man will arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the
mansion
was the British general's headquarters. It stands in a
great
garden—oriental fashion—and about it are many noble
trees. The
trees harbor monkeys; and they are monkeys of
a watchful and enterprising sort, and not
much troubled with
fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance,
and
carry off everything they don't want. One morning the
master of the house was in his
bath, and the window was
open. Near it stood a pot of yellow paint and a brush.
Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them away,
the gentleman threw his sponge
at them. They did not scare
at all; they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint
all over him from the brush, and drove him out; then they
painted the walls and
the floor and the tank and the windows
and the furniture yellow, and were in the dressing-room
painting that when help
arrived and routed them.
Two of these creatures came into my room in the early
morning, through a window whose
shutters I had left open,
and when I woke one of them was before the glass brushing
his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading
a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the
one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt
me; it hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was
wrong, for my host had told me that the monkeys were best
left alone. They threw everything at me that they could lift,
and then went into the bathroom to get some more things,
and I shut the door on them.
At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay.
We were not in the native city,
but several miles from it, in
the small European official suburb. There were but few
Europeans—only
fourteen—but they were all kind and hospitable,
and it amounted to
being at home. In Jeypore we found again
what we had found all about
India—that while the Indian
servant is in his way a very real treasure, he
will sometimes
bear watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends
him on
an errand, he wants more than the man's word for it
that he did the errand. When fruit
and vegetables were sent
to us, a "chit" came with them—a receipt for us to
sign;
otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman sent
up his carriage,
the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour
"to" such-and-such an hour—which
made it unhandy for the
coachman and his two or three subordinates to put us off with
a part of the allotted time and devote the rest of it to a lark
of their own.
We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in
an empty large compound
which was surrounded by a mud
wall as high as a man's head. The inn was kept by nine
Hindoo
brothers, its owners. They lived, with their families, in a
one-storied building
within the compound, but off to one side,
and there was always a long pile of their
little comely brown
children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of
the parents wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the
AN HONEST CRITIC.
howdah, or whatever they call it. By the veranda stood a
palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led a lonesome life, and
always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered him a
good deal.
The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized
the secluded and country air of
the place, and there was a dog
of no particular breed, who was always present in the
compound,
and always asleep, always stretched out baking
in the
sun and adding to the deep tranquility and reposefulness of the
place, when
the crows were away on business. White-draperied
servants were coming and going all the
time, but they seemed
only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound.
Down the lane a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble
tree, and rocked and
rocked, and reached about with his trunk,
begging of his brown mistress or fumbling the
children playing
at his feet. And there were camels about, but they go on
velvet feet, and were
proper to the silence and serenity of the
surroundings.
The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not
our Satan, but the other one.
Our Satan was lost to us. In
these later days he had passed out of our
life—lamented by
me, and sincerely. I was missing him; I am missing him yet,
after all these months. He was an astonishing creature to fly
around and do
things. He didn't always do them quite right,
but he did them,
and did them suddenly. There was no time
wasted. You would say:
"Pack the trunks and bags, Satan."
"Wair good" (very good).
Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing
and humming and buzzing,
and a spectacle as of a whirlwind
spinning gowns and jackets and coats and boots and
things
through the air, and then—with bow and touch—
"Awready, master."
It was wonderful. It made one dizzy. He crumpled
dresses a good deal, and he had no
particular plan about the
work—at first—except to put each article
into the trunk it
didn't belong in. But he soon reformed, in this matter. Not
entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into the satchel
sacred to literature any odds
and ends of rubbish that he
couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. When threatened
with death for this, it did not trouble him; he only looked
pleasant, saluted with
soldierly grace, said "Wair good," and
did it again next day.
He was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots
polished, the clothes brushed,
the wash-basin full of clean
water, my dress clothes laid out and ready for the
lecture-hall
an hour ahead of time; and he dressed me from head to heel
in spite
of my determination to do it myself, according to my
lifelong custom.
He was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and
dispute with inferiors and
harry them and bullyrag them. He
was fine at the railway station—yes, he was
at his finest there.
He would shoulder and plunge and paw his violent way
through
the packed multitude of natives with nineteen coolies
at his tail, each bearing a trifle
of luggage—one a trunk, another
a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; one
article to each, and the
longer the procession, the better he was
suited—and he was sure to make for
some engaged sleeper
and begin to hurl the owner's things out of it, swearing that it
was ours and that there had been a mistake. Arrived at our
own sleeper, he would
undo the bedding-bundles and make the
beds and put everything to rights and shipshape in
two minutes;
then put his head out at a window and have a
restful
good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill
until we
arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise.
Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil
in India—and that is saying much, very much, indeed. I
loved him for his noise, but the family detested him for it.
They could not abide it; they could not get reconciled to it.
It humiliated them. As a rule, when we got within six hundred
yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty
racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming
would break upon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the
family would say, with shame:
"There—that's Satan. Why do you keep him?"
And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen
hundred wondering people we
would find that little scrap of a
creature gesticulating like a spider with the colic,
his black
eyes snapping, his fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out
floods of
billingsgate upon his gang of beseeching and astonished
coolies.
I loved him; I couldn't help it; but the family—why, they
could hardly
speak of him with patience. To this day I regret
his loss, and wish I had him back; but
they—it is different
with them. He was a native, and came from Surat. Twenty
degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace and Manuel's,
and fifteen hundred
between their ways and characters and
dispositions. I only liked Manuel, but I loved
Satan. This
latter's real name was intensely Indian. I could not quite get
the
hang of it, but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder
Clam Chowder. It was too long for
handy use, anyway; so I
reduced it.
When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began
to make mistakes which I had
difficulty in patching up for
him. Approaching Benares one day, he got out of the train
to see if be could get up a misunderstanding with somebody,
for it had been a
weary, long journey and he wanted to
freshen up. He found what he was after, but kept up
his
pow-wow a shade too long and got left. So there we were in a
strange city and no chambermaid. It was awkward for us,
and we told him he must not do so any more. He saluted and
said in his dear, pleasant way, "Wair good." Then at Lucknow
he got drunk. I said it was a fever, and got the family's
compassion and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a teaspoonful
of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire. He
made several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the
Lisbon earthquake than any I have ever got of it from paintings
and descriptions. His drunk was still portentously solid
next morning, but I could have pulled him through with the
family if he would only have taken another spoonful of that
remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still
had flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and
said, fumblingly saluting:
"Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan
not prefer it, please."
Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk.
They gave him prompt notice
that next time this happened
he must go. He got out a maudlin and most gentle "Wair
good," and saluted indefinitely.
Only one short week later he fell again. And oh, sorrow!
not in a hotel this time, but
in an English gentleman's private
house. And in Agra, of all places. So he had to go.
When
I told him, he said patiently, "Wair good," and made his parting
salute, and went out from us to return no more forever.
Dear me! I would rather
have lost a hundred angels than that
one poor lovely devil. What style he used to put
on, in a
swell hotel or in a private house—snow-white muslin from
his
chin to his bare feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold
thread around his waist, and
on his head a great sea-green
turban like to the turban of the Grand Turk.
He was not a liar, but he will become one if he keeps on.
He told me once that he used
to crack cocoanuts with his
CITY GATE.—JEYPORE.
teeth when he was a boy; and when I asked how he got them
into his mouth, he said he was upward of six feet high at that
time, and had an unusual mouth. And when I followed him
up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said
a house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature
back again. Swervings like these from the strict line of fact
often beguile a truthful man on and on until he eventually
becomes a liar.
SAHADAT KHAN.
His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat
Mohammed Khan; very dark, very tall, very
grave. He went always in flowing masses of
white, from the top of his big turban
down
to his bare feet. His voice was low. He
glided about in a noiseless way, and
looked
like a ghost. He was competent and satisfactory.
But where he was, it seemed always
Sunday. It was not so in Satan's time.
Jeypore is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features
which indicate the
presence of European science and European
interest in the weal of the common public,
such as the liberal
water-supply furnished by great works built at the State's
expense; good sanitation, resulting in a degree of healthfulness
unusually high for India; a noble pleasure garden, with
privileged days for women;
schools for the instruction of
native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and
utilitarian;
and a new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of
extraordinary
interest and value. Without the Maharaja's
sympathy and purse these beneficences could
not have been
created; but he is a man of wide views and large generosities,
and
all such matters find hospitality with him.
We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiser-i-Hind, a
journey which was always
full of interest, both night and day,
for that country road was never quiet, never empty, but was
always India in motion, always a streaming flood of brown
people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a tossing and
moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying confusion
of strange human and strange animal life and equally
strange and outlandish vehicles.
And the city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that,
but this one is not like
any other that we saw. It is shut up in
a lofty turreted wall; the main body of it is
divided into six
parts by perfectly straight streets that are more than a hundred
feet wide; the blocks of houses exhibit a long frontage of
the most taking
architectural quaintnesses, the straight lines
being broken everywhere by pretty little
balconies, pillared
and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting
perches and projections, and many of the fronts are
curiously pictured by the
brush, and the whole of them have
the soft rich tint of strawberry ice-cream. One cannot
look
down the far stretch of the chief street and persuade himself
that these are
real houses, and that it is all out of doors—the
impression that it is an
unreality, a picture, a scene in a theater,
is the only one
that will take hold.
Then there came a great day when this illusion was more
pronounced than ever. A rich
Hindoo had been spending a
fortune upon the manufacture of a crowd of idols and accompanying
paraphernalia whose purpose was to illustrate scenes
in the life of his especial
god or saint, and this fine show was
to be brought through the town in processional
state at ten
in the morning. As we passed through the great public
pleasure garden
on our way to the city we found it crowded
with natives. That was one sight. Then there
was another.
In the midst of the spacious lawns stands the palace which
contains
the museum—a beautiful construction of stone which
shows arched colonnades,
one above another, and receding,
STREET SCENE IN JEYPORE.
terrace-fashion, toward the sky. Every one of these terraces,
all the way to the top one, was packed and jammed with
natives. One must try to imagine those solid masses of splendid
color, one above another, up and up, against the blue sky,
and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of fire and flame.
Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the
chief avenue, smouldering in its
crushed-strawberry tint, those
splendid effects were repeated; for every balcony, and
every
fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery countersunk in the house-fronts,
and all the long lines of roofs were crowded with
people,
and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color.
Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down
into the distance, was alive
with gorgeously-clothed people—
not still, but moving, swaying, drifting,
eddying, a delirious display
of all colors and all shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale,
soft, strong,
stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea
blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane; and presently,
through this storm of
color, came swaying and swinging the
majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of
gaudinesses,
and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with their
groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard
of stately camels, with their picturesque riders.
For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness,
and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most
satisfying show I had ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have
the privilege of looking
upon its like again.
CHAPTER LXI.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made
School Boards.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction
of deaf and dumb and blind children than we
sometimes apply in our American public
schools to the
instruction of children who are in possession of all their
faculties? The result would be that the deaf and dumb and
blind would acquire nothing.
They would live and die as
ignorant as bricks and stones. The methods used in the
asylums are rational. The teacher exactly measures the
child's capacity, to begin with;
and from thence onwards the
tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development
of
that capacity; the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's
progress, they
don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by
irrational caprice and land in
vacancy—according to the
average public-school plan. In the public school,
apparently,
they teach the child to spell cat, then ask it to calculate an
eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables, they require
it to explain the
circulation of the blood; when it reaches the
head of the infant class they bully it
with conundrums that
cover the domain of universal knowledge. This sounds extravagant—and
is; yet it goes no great way beyond the
facts.
I received a curious letter one day, from the Punjab (you
must pronounce it
Punjawb). The handwriting was excellent,
and the
wording was English—English, and yet not exactly
English. The style was easy
and smooth and flowing, yet
there was something subtly foreign about it—something tropically
ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to
be the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical
billet in a railway office. He had been educated in one of the
numerous colleges of India. Upon inquiry I was told that the
country was full of young fellows of his like. They had been
educated away up to the snow-summits of learning—and the
market for all this elaborate cultivation was minutely out of
proportion to the vastness of the product. This market consisted
of some thousands of small clerical posts under the
government—the supply of material for it was multitudinous.
If this youth with the flowing style and the blossoming English
was occupying a small railway clerkship, it meant that
there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as he, or he
would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there
were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a
little short, and that they would have to go without places.
Apparently, then, the colleges of India were doing what our
high schools have long been doing—richly over-supplying the
market for highly-educated service; and thereby doing a damage
to the scholar, and through him to the country.
At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted
by the high school in making handicrafts distasteful to
boys who would have been
willing to make a living at trades
and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to
stop with
the common school. But I made no converts. Not one, in a
community
overrun with educated idlers who were above following
their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no
market for their
book-knowledge. The same mail that brought
me the letter from the Punjab, brought also a
little book published
by Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., of Calcutta, which
interested me, for
both its preface and its contents treated of
this matter of over-education. In the
preface occurs this paragraph
from the Calcutta Review. For "Government office"
read "dry-goods clerkship" and it will fit more than one
region of America:
"The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in their
manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On the other
hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to
work with their hands. The form which discontent takes in this country is
not of a healthy kind; for, the Natives of India consider that the only occupation
worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially
in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the
plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same
discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. Sometimes these
ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents
have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be
inveigled to school."
The little book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian
Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English—clerkly
English, booky English, acquired in the schools.
Some of it is very
funny,—almost as funny, perhaps, as what
you and I produce when we try to
write in a language not our
own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and free. If I
were
going to quote good English—but I am not. India
is well
stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the
best of us.
I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect
attempts at the use of our tongue. There are many letters
in the book; poverty
imploring help—bread, money, kindness,
office—generally an office,
a clerkship, some way to get food
and a rag out of the applicant's unmarketable
education; and
food not for himself alone, but sometimes for a dozen helpless
relations in addition to his own family; for those people are
astonishingly unselfish,
and admirably faithful to their ties of
kinship. Among us I think there is nothing
approaching it.
Strange as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are,
humble and even groveling as some of them are, and quaintly
funny and confused as a
goodly number of them are, there is
still a pathos about them, as a rule, that checks
the rising laugh
and reproaches it. In the following letter "father" is not to
be read literally. In Ceylon a little native beggar-girl embarrassed
me by calling me father, although I knew she was mistaken.
I was so new that I did not know that she was merely
following the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.
"SIR.
"I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy I
have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy good sight,
you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is your wish I am very
poor
boy, this understand what is your wish you my father I am your son
this understand
what is your wish.
"Your Sirvent,
P. C. B."
Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these
people at the hands of their
native rulers, they come legitimately
by the attitude and language of fawning and flattery,
and one must remember this
in mitigation when passing judgment
upon the native character. It is common in these letters
to find the petitioner
furtively trying to get at the white man's
soft religious side; even this poor boy baits
his hook with a
macerated Bible-text in the hope that it may catch something
if
all else fail.
Here is an application for the post of instructor in English
to some children:
"My Dear Sir or Gentleman, that your Petitioner has much qualification
in the
Language of English to instruct the young boys; I was given to
understand that your of
suitable children has to acquire the knowledge of
English language."
As a sample of the flowery Eastern style, I will take a
sentence or two from a long
letter written by a young native
to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal—an
application for
employment:
"Honored and Much Respected Sir,
"I hope your honor will condescend to hear the tale of this poor creature.
I shall
overflow with gratitude at this mark of your royal condescension.
The bird-like
happiness has flown away from my nest-like heart and has not
hitherto returned from
the period whence the rose of my father's life suffered
the autumnal breath of
death, in plain English he passed through the
gates of Grave, and from that hour the
phantom of delight has never danced
before me."
"I WAS EMBARRASSED."
It is all school-English, book-English, you see; and good
enough, too, all things
considered. If the native boy had but
that one study he would shine, he would dazzle, no
doubt.
But that is not the case. He is situated as are our public-school
children—loaded down with an over-freightage of
other studies; and
frequently they are as far beyond the actual
point of progress reached by him and suited
to the stage of
development attained, as could be imagined by the insanest
fancy.
Apparently—like our public-school boy—he must
work, work, work, in
school and out, and play but little.
Apparently—like our public-school
boy—his "education"
consists in learning things, not
the meaning of them; he is fed
upon the husks, not the corn. From several essays written
by
native schoolboys in answer to the question of how they spend
their day, I
select one—the one which goes most into detail:
"66. At the break of day I rises from my own bed and finish my daily
duty, then I
employ myself till 8 o'clock, after which I employ myself to
bathe, then take for my
body some sweet meat, and just at 9½ I came to
school to attend my class
duty, then at 2½ P. M. I return from school and
engage myself to do my
natural duty, then, I engage for a quarter to take my
tiffin, then I study till 5 P.
M., after which I began to play anything which
comes on my head. After 8½
half pass to eight we are began to sleep, before
sleeping I told a constable just 11 o'
he came and rose us from half pass
eleven we began to read still morning."
It is not perfectly clear, now that I come to cipher upon it.
He gets up at about 5 in
the morning, or along there somewhere,
and goes to bed
about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward—that
much of it seems straight; but why he should rise
again three hours later and
resume his studies till morning is
puzzling.
I think it is because he is studying history. History
requires a world of time and
bitter hard work when your
"education" is no further advanced than the cat's; when you
are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty
names and random
incidents and elusive dates, which no one
teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay
you not a farthing's value for your waste of time. Yes, I
think he had to get up at half-past 11 p. m. in order to be sure
to be perfect with his history lesson by noon. With results as
follows—from a Calcutta school examination:"Q. Who was Cardinal Wolsey?"Cardinal Wolsey was an Editor of a paper named North Briton. No. 45
of his publication he charged the King of uttering a lie from the throne. He
was arrested and cast into prison; and after releasing went to France."3. As Bishop of York but died in disentry in a church on his way to
be blockheaded."8. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of Edward IV, after his father's
death he himself ascended the throne at the age of (10) ten only, but when he
surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age at that time he
wished to make a journey in his countries under him, but he was opposed by
his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's example he remained
in the home, and then became King. After many times obstacles and many
confusion he become King and afterwards his brother."
There is probably not a word of truth in that.
"Q. What is the meaning of Ich Dien?"10. An honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of English Sovereigns.It is nothing more than some feathers."11. Ich Dien was the word which was written on the feathers of the
blind King who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the horse."13. Ich Dien is a title given to Henry VII by the Pope of Rome, when
he forwarded the Reformation of Cardinal Wolsy to Rome, and for this
reason he was called Commander of the faith."
A dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in
the book from that
examination. Each answer is sweeping
proof, all by itself, that the person uttering it
was pushed
ahead of where he belonged when he was put into history;
proof that he
had been put to the task of acquiring history
before he had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it,
which is the equivalent of dumping a pupil into
geometry
before he has learned the progressive steps which lead up to it
and make
its acquirement possible. Those Calcutta novices
had no business with history. There was
no excuse for examing
them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers.
They were totally
empty; there was nothing to "examine."
Helen Kellar has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind,
ever since she was a little
baby a year-and-a-half old; and now
at sixteen years of age this miraculous creature,
this wonder of
all the ages, passes the Harvard University examination in
Latin,
German, French history, belles lettres, and such things,
and does
it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace fashion.
She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar
with the meanings of them. When she writes an essay on a
Shakespearean character, her
English is fine and strong, her
grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her
page is electric with light. Has Miss Sullivan taught
her by
the methods of India and the American public school? No, oh,
no; for then
she would be deafer and dumber and blinder
than she was before. It is a pity that we
can't educate all the
children in the asylums.
To continue the Calcutta exposure:
"What is the meaning of a Sheriff?"
"25. Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John. The duty of Sheriffhere in Calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly driven
out by the coachman; but it is a high post in England."26. Sheriff was the English bill of common prayer."27. The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called
Sheriff."28. Sheriff—Latin term for 'shrub,' we called broom, worn by the
first earl of Enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage,
and from this their hairs took their crest and sur name."29. Sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as Barons, Nobles, etc."30. Sheriff, a title given on those persons who were respective and
pious in England."
The students were examined in the following bulky matters:
Geometry, the Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act,
the British Parliament, and in
Metaphysics they were asked to
trace the progress of skepticism from Descartes to Hume.
It
is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing.
Without doubt, there were students present who justified
their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies;
but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed
into these studies to waste their time over them when they
could have been profitably employed in hunting smaller game.
Under the head of Geometry, one of the answers is this:"49. The whole BD=the whole CA, and so-so-so-so-so-so—so.
To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry.
That was the only effort
made among the five students who
appeared for examination in geometry; the other four
wailed
and surrendered without a fight. They are piteous wails, too,
wails of
despair; and one of them is an eloquent reproach; it
comes from a poor fellow who has
been laden beyond his
strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the
poverty of its English. The poor chap finds himself required
to explain riddles
which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able
to understand:
number of pass you my great father."51. I am a poor boy and have no means to support my mother and two
brothers who are suffering much for want of food. I get four rupees monthly
from charity fund of this place, from which I send two rupees for their support,
and keep two for my own support. Father, if I relate the unlucky circumstance
under which we are placed, then, I think, you will not be able to
suppress the tender tear."52. Sir which Sir Isaac Newton and other experienced mathematicians
cannot understand I being third of Entrance Class can understand these
which is too impossible to imagine. And my examiner also has put very
tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove."
We must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking
in one language, and express themselves in another and
alien one. It was a heavy
handicap. I have by me "English
as She is Taught"—a collection of American
examinations
made in the public schools of Brooklyn by one of the teachers,
Miss
Caroline B. Le Row. An extract or two from its pages
will show that when the American
pupil is using but one language,
and that one his own, his
performance is no whit better
than his Indian brother's:
"Christopher Columbus was called the father of his Country. Queen
Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that Columbus
could discover America.
"The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.
"The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then
scalping them.
"Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life
was saved by
his daughter Pochahantas.
"The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.
"The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they
should be null and
void.
"Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken
to the
cathedral in Havana.
"Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas."
In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when
they find out he doesn't know
anything, they put him into
literature, or geometry, or astronomy, or government, or
something
like that, so that he can properly display the assification
of the whole system:
" 'Bracebridge Hall' was written by Henry Irving.
"Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.
"Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.
"Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects.
"In the 'Canterbury Tale' it gives account of King Alfred on his way to
the shrine of
Thomas Bucket.
"Chaucer was the father of English pottery.
"Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow."
We will finish with a couple of samples of "literature,"—
one from America,
the other from India. The first is a
Brooklyn public-school boy's attempt to turn a few
verses of
the "Lady of the Lake" into prose. You will have to concede
that he did it:
"The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument
made of steel
alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from
the time passed with
hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with
weariness, while every breath for
labor he drew with cries full of sorrow, the
young deer made imperfect who worked hard
filtered in sight."
The following paragraph is from a little book which is
famous in India—the
biography of a distinguished Hindoo
judge, Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee; it was written by
his
nephew, and is unintentionally funny—in fact, exceedingly
so. I offer here the closing scene. If you would like to
sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the
publishers, Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta:
"And having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to open
them again. All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could be procured
for a man of his position and wealth were brought,—Doctors Payne, Fayrer,
and Nilmadhub Mookerjee and others; they did what they could do, with
their puissance and knack of medical knowledge, but it proved after all as if
to milk the ram! His wife and children had not the mournful consolation to
hear his last words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken
from us at 6.12 P.M. according to the caprice of God which passeth understanding."
CHAPTER LXII.
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March;
stopped a
day at Madras; two or three days in
Ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for
Mauritius. From my diary:
April 7. We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of
the Indian
Ocean, now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful
under the vast spread of the awnings,
and life is perfect again
—ideal.
The difference between a river and the sea is, that the river
looks fluid, the sea
solid—usually looks as if you could step
out and walk on it.
The captain has this peculiarity—he cannot tell the truth
in a plausible
way. In this he is the very opposite of the
austere Scot who sits midway of the table;
he cannot tell a lie
in an unplausible
way. When the captain finishes a statement
the passengers glance at each other
privately, as who should
say, "Do you believe that?" When the Scot finishes one, the
look says, "How strange and interesting." The whole secret
is in the manner and
method of the two men. The captain is
a little shy and diffident, and he states the
simplest fact as if he
were a little afraid of it, while the Scot delivers himself of
the
most abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one
is forced to
believe it although one knows it isn't so. For instance,
the Scot told about a pet flying-fish he once owned, that
lived in a little fountain in
his conservatory, and supported
itself by catching birds and frogs and rats in the neighboring
fields. It was plain that no one at the table doubted this
statement.
By and by, in the course of some talk about custom-house
annoyances, the captain
brought out the following simple every-day
incident, but through his infirmity of style managed to
tell it in such a way that
it got no credence. He said:
"I went ashore at Naples one voyage when I
was in that trade, and stood around
helping my
passengers, for I could speak a little Italian. Two
or three times, at
intervals, the officer asked me if I
had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more
and more put out and disappointed every time I
told him no. Finally a passenger
whom I had
helped through asked me to come out and take
something. I thanked him,
but excused myself,
saying I had taken a whisky just before I came
ashore.
"It was a fatal admission. The officer at once
made me pay sixpence import-duty on
the whisky—
just from ship to shore, you see; and he fined me
£5 for not declaring the goods, another £5 for falsely
denying
that I had anything dutiable about me,
also £5 for concealing the goods, and
£50 for smuggling,
which is the maximum
penalty for unlawfully
bringing in goods under the value of sevenpence
ha'penny.
Altogether, sixty-five pounds sixpence
for a little thing like that."
A FEMALE UNCLE.
The Scot is always believed, yet he
never tells anything but lies; whereas the
captain is never believed, although he never
tells a lie, so far as I can judge. If he
should say his uncle
was a male person, he would probably say it in such a way
that nobody would believe it; at the same time the Scot could
claim that he had a female
uncle and not stir a doubt in anybody's
mind. My own luck has been curious all my literary
life; I never could tell a lie
that anybody would doubt, nor a
truth that anybody would believe.
Lots of pets on board—birds and things. In these far
countries the white people do seem to run remarkably to
pets. Our host in Cawnpore had a fine collection of birds—
the finest we saw in a private house in India. And in Colombo,
Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious bungalow were
well populated with domesticated
company from the
woods: frisky little squirrels;
a Ceylon mina walking sociably
about the house; a small
green parrot that whistled a
single urgent note of call without
motion of its beak; also
chuckled; a monkey in a cage
on the back veranda, and some
more out in the trees; also a
number of beautiful macaws
in the trees; and various and
sundry birds and animals of
breeds not known to me. But
no cat. Yet a cat would have
liked that place.
A CAT WOULD LIKE THAT PLACE.
April 9. Tea-planting is
the great business in Ceylon,
now. A passenger says it
often pays 40 per cent. on
the investment. Says there is
a boom.
April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe
that
that is about the divinest color known to nature.
It is strange and fine—Nature's lavish generosities to her
creatures. At
least to all of them except man. For those
that fly she has provided a home that is
nobly spacious—a
home which is forty miles deep and envelops the whole globe,
and has not an obstruction in it. For those that swim she has
provided a more than imperial domain—a domain which is
miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for
man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the
creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin
which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth—the naked
bones stick up through it in most places. On the one-half of
this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing
else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of
but a single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to
grub hard to get enough to keep him alive and provide kings
and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization
with. Yet man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability
to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the important
member of the family—in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must
occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious
way of showing it.
Afternoon. The captain has been telling how, in one of
his
Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze
fast to the deck and had to
be ripped loose by main strength.
And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back.
Nobody
said anything, and the captain went away. I think he is
becoming disheartened. . .
. Also, to be fair, there is
another word of praise due to this ship's library: it
contains
no copy of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of
complacent
hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john
heroes and heroines, who are always
showing off, of bad people
who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.
A singular book. Not a
sincere line in it, and not a character
that invites respect; a book which is one long
waste-pipe discharge
of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a
book which is full of pathos
which revolts, and humor which
grieves the heart. There are few things in literature
that are
more piteous, more pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous"
incident of Moses and the spectacles.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just
that one omission alone
would make a fairly good library out
of a library that hadn't a book in it.
"THE BARBER . . . FLAYS US ON THE BREEZY DECK."
Customs in tropic seas. At 5 in the morning they pipe to
wash down the decks, and at
once the ladies who are sleeping
there turn out and they and their beds go below. Then
one
after another the men come up from the bath in their pyjamas,
and walk the
decks an hour or two with bare legs and bare
feet. Coffee and fruit served. The ship cat and her kitten
now appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes
and flays us on the breezy deck. Breakfast at 9.30, and the
day begins. I do not know how a day could be more reposeful:
no motion; a level blue sea; nothing in sight from horizon
to horizon; the speed of the ship furnishes a cooling breeze;
there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to excite
you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you—the world is
far, far away; it has ceased to exist for you—seemed a fading
dream, along in the first days; has dissolved to an unreality
now; it is gone from your mind with all its businesses and
ambitions, its prosperities and disasters, its exultations and
despairs, its joys and griefs and cares and worries. They are
no concern of your any more; they have gone out of your
life; they are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm
behind. The people group themselves about the decks in their
snowy white linen, and read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap,
and so on. In other ships the passengers are always ciphering
about when they are going to arrive; out in these seas it is
rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached. In other ships
there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon to
find out what the "run" has been; in these seas the bulletin
seems to attract no interest; I have seen no one visit it; in
thirteen days I have visited it only once. Then I happened to
notice the figures of the day's run. On that day there happened
to be talk, at dinner, about the speed of modern ships.
I was the only passenger present who knew this ship's gait.
Necessarily, the Atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is
not a custom here—nobody ever mentions it.
I myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to
"get in"; if any one else
feels interested in the matter he has
not indicated it in my hearing. If I had my way we
should
never get in at all. This sort of sea life is charged with an indestructible
charm. There is no weariness, no fatigue, no worry,
no responsibility, no work, no depression of spirits. There is
nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace, this deep
contentment, to be found anywhere on land. If I had my way
I would sail on for ever and never go to live on the solid
ground again.
One of Kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment
of this bewitching sea correctly:
"The Injian Ocean sets an' smilesSo sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue;There aren't a wave for miles an' milesExcep' the jiggle from the screw."
April 14. It turns out that the astronomical apprentice
worked
off a section of the Milky Way on me for the Magellan
Clouds. A man of more experience
in the business showed
one of them to me last night. It was small and faint and
delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of white smoke
left floating in the sky
by an exploded bombshell.
Wednesday, April 15. Mauritius. Arrived and anchored
off Port
Louis 2 A. M. Rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green
to their summits; from their
bases to the sea a green plain with
just tilt enough to it to make the water drain off.
I believe it
is in 56° E. and 22° S.—a hot tropical
country. The green
plain has an inviting look; has scattering dwellings nestling
among the greenery. Scene of the sentimental adventure of
Paul and Virginia.
Island under French control—which means a community
which depends upon
quarantines, not sanitation, for its health.
Thursday, April 16. Went ashore in the forenoon at Port
Louis,
a little town, but with the largest variety of nationalities
and complexions we have encountered yet. French,
English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans
with wool, blacks with
straight hair, East Indians, half-whites,
quadroons—and great
varieties in costumes and colors.
Took the train for Curepipe at 1.30—two hours' run,
gradually uphill. What
a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of
vegetation, with the arid plains of India; these
architecturally
picturesque crags and knobs and miniature mountains, with
the
monotony of the Indian dead-levels.
A native pointed out a handsome swarthy man of grave
and dignified bearing, and said
in an awed tone, "That is so-and-so;
has held office of one
sort or another under this government
for 37 years—he is known all over this whole island—
and in
the other countries of the world perhaps—who knows?
One thing is certain; you
can speak his name anywhere in this
whole island, and you will find not one grown person
that has
not heard it. It is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated; yet
look at
him; it makes no change in him; he does not even
seem to know it."
Curepipe (means Pincushion or Pegtown, probably).
Sixteen
miles (two hours) by rail from Port Louis. At each end
of every
roof and on the apex of every dormer window a
wooden peg two feet high stands up; in
some cases its top is
blunt, in others the peg is sharp and looks like a toothpick.
The passion for this humble ornament is universal.
Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the
history of Mauritius, and
that one didn't happen. I refer to
the romantic sojourn of Paul and Virginia here. It
was that
story that made Mauritius known to the world, made the name
familiar to
everybody, the geographical position of it to
nobody.
A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a
table. It was a vellum fan
painted with the shipwreck, and
was "one of Virginia's wedding
gifts."
April 18. This is the only country in the world where the
stranger is not asked "How do you like this place?" This is
indeed a large distinction.
Here the citizen does the talking
about the country himself; the stranger is not asked to help.
you get all sorts of information. From one citizen you gather
the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and
that heaven was copied after Mauritius. Another one tells you
that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief villages, Port
Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection; that nobody
lives in Port Louis
except upon compulsion,
and that Curepipe is the
wettest and rainiest place
in the world. An English
citizen said:
THE WETTEST PLACE ON EARTH.
"In the early part of this
century Mauritius was used by
the French as a basis
from which
to operate against England's
Indian merchantmen; so England
captured the island and
also the neighbor, Bourbon, to
stop that annoyance.
England
gave Bourbon back; the government
in London did not want any
more possessions 'in the West
Indies.' If the
government had
had a better quality of geography
in stock it would not have
wasted Bourbon in that foolish
way. A big war
will temporarily
shut up the Suez Canal
some day and the English ships
will have to go to
India around
the Cape of Good Hope again;
then England will have to have
Bourbon and will take it.
"Mauritius was a crown
colony until 20 years ago, with
a governor appointed by
the
Crown and assisted by a Council
appointed by himself; but Pope Hennessey came out as Governor then,
and he worked
hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded.
So now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of
legislation
they vote together and in the French interest, not the English.
The English population is very slender; it has not votes enough to elect a
legislator. Half a dozen rich French families elect the legislature. Pope
Hennessey was an Irishman, a Catholic, a Home Ruler, M. P., a hater of England
and the English, a very troublesome person and a serious incumbrance
at Westminster; so it was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries,
in hope that something would happen to him. But nothing did. The
first experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. He
proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to encounter.
The next experiment was here. The dark scheme failed again. It was an
off-season and there was nothing but measles here at the time. Pope Hennessey's
health was not affected. He worked with the French and for the
French and against the English, and he made the English very tired and the
French very happy, and lived to have the joy of seeing the flag he served
publicly hissed. His memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection
by the French.
"It is a land of extraordinary quarantines. They quarantine a ship for
anything or for
nothing; quarantine her for 20 and even 30 days. They once
quarantined a ship because
her captain had had the smallpox when he was a
boy. That and because he was English.
"The population is very small; small to insignificance. The majority is
East Indian;
then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of the slaves of the
French
times); then French; then English. There was an American, but
he is dead or
mislaid. The mongrels are the result of all kinds of mixtures;
black and white, mulatto
and white, quadroon and white, octoroon and white.
And so there is every shade of
complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horse-chestnut,
sorrel, molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white,
new-ivory white,
fish-belly white—this latter the leprous complexion frequent
with the
Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates.
"You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now
would you? But it
is so. The most of them have never been out of the
island, and haven't read much or
studied much, and they think the world
consists of three principal
countries—Judæa, France, and Mauritius; so they
are very proud of
belonging to one of the three grand divisions of the globe.
They think that Russia and
Germany are in England, and that England does
not amount to much. They have heard
vaguely about the United States and
the equator, but they think both of them are
monarchies. They think Mount
Peter Botte is the highest mountain in the world, and if
you show one of
them a picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and
say
that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the forest of peg-tops
and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe look so fine and prickly.
"There is not much trade in books. The newspapers educate and entertain
the people. Mainly the latter. They have two pages of large-print
reading-matter—one of them English, the other French. The English page
is a
translation of the French one. The typography is super-extra primitive:
in this quality
it has not its equal anywhere. There is no proof-reader now;
he is dead.
"Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island lost in the
wastes of the Indian Ocean? Oh, Madagascar. They discuss Madagascar
and France. That is the bulk. Then they chock up the rest with advice to
the Government. Also, slurs upon
the English administration. The
papers are all owned and edited
by creoles—French.
ANCIENT NEWS AT PORT LOUIS.
"The language of the country
is French. Everybody speaks it
—has to.
You have to know
French—particularly mongrel
French, the patois spoken
by
Tom, Dick, and Harry of the
multiform complexions—or you
can't
get along.
"This was a flourishing country
in former days, for it made
then and still makes the best
sugar in the
world; but first the
Suez Canal severed it from the
world and left it out in the
cold,
and next the beetroot sugar,
helped by bounties, captured the
European
markets. Sugar is the
life of Mauritius, and it is losing
its grip. Its downward
course
was checked by the depreciation
of the rupee—for the planter
pays wages in rupees but sells his
crop for gold—and the insurrection
in Cuba and paralyzation of
the sugar industry there have
given our prices
here a life-saving
lift; but the outlook has nothing
permanently favorable about it. It takes a year to mature the canes
—on
the high ground three and six months longer—and there is always a
chance that
the annual cyclone will rip the profit out of the crop. In recent
times a cyclone took
the whole crop, as you may say; and the island never
saw a finer one. Some of the
noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep
difficulties. A dozen of them are
investments of English capital; and the
companies that own them are at work now, trying
to settle up and get out
with a saving of half the money they put in. You know, in these
days,
when a country begins to introduce the tea culture, it means that its own
specialty has gone back on it. Look at Bengal; look at Ceylon. Well,
they've begun to
introduce the tea culture, here.
"Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No
other book is
so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed to be
a part of the Bible. All
the missionaries work up their French on it when
they come here to pervert the Catholic
mongrel. It is the greatest story that
was ever written about Mauritius, and the only
one."
CHAPTER LXIII.
The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine
lives.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
20.—The cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled
hundreds of people; it was accompanied by a deluge
of rain, which drowned Port
Louis and produced a
water famine. Quite true; for it burst the
reservoir and the
water-pipes; and for a time after
the flood had disappeared
there was
much distress from want of water.
ONLY ONE IN SIXTEEN.
This is the only place in the
world where no breed of matches
can stand the damp. Only one
match in 16 will light.
The roads are hard and
smooth; some of the compounds
are spacious, some of the
bungalows
commodious, and the roadways
are walled by tall bamboo
hedges, trim and green and beautiful;
and there are azalea hedges,
too, both the white and the red;
I never saw that before.
As to healthiness: I translate
from to-day's(April 20) Merchants'
and Planters' Gazette, from the
article of a
regular contributor,
"Carminge," concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent
citizen:
"Sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius; I believe
there is no other country in the world where one dies more easily than among
us. The least indisposition becomes a mortal malady; a simple headache develops
into meningitis; a cold into pneumonia, and presently, when we are
least expecting it, death is a guest in our home."
This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells
you what the weather was day
before yesterday.
One is never pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this
town, so far as I can see. This
is pleasantly different from
India.
April 22. To such as believe that the quaint product called
French civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization
of New Guinea and the like, the snatching of Madagascar
and the laying on of
French civilization there will be fully
justified. But why did the English allow the
French to have
Madagascar? Did she respect a theft of a couple of centuries
ago?
Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's
territories has never been a sin,
is not a sin to-day. To the several
cabinets the several political establishments of the world
are clothes-lines; and
a large part of the official duty of these
cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's
wash and grab what
they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions
of all the political establishments in the earth—
including America, of
course—consist of pilferings from
other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever
insignificant, and no
nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was
not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards
reached America, the Indian
tribes had been raiding each
other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre
of
ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen 500
times. The English,
the French, and the Spaniards went to
work and stole it all over again; and when that
was satisfactorily
accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it
from each other. In Europe
and Asia and Africa every acre
of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime
persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and
becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes
all other forms of law. Christian governments are as
frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects
for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before
the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and
couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. In 150 years England
has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian
lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left
dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite
savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief;
she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry
on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole
wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that
stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now
and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is
England's prospective property, and Russia knows it; but
Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land-robbery,
claim-jumping, is become a European governmental
frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in
Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been
at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned
out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid
for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game
again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast
slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English
missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but
with certain formalities neglected—no signs up, "Keep off the
grass," "Trespassers forbidden," etc.—and she stepped in with
a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those
English pioneers promptly out of the country.
There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the
form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind
about the moralities.
It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with
it. Now, in the case of
Madagascar, the formalities had originally
been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude
ages ago. England
should have snatched Madagascar from
the French clothes-line. Without an effort she
could have
saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French
civilization,
and she did not do it. Now it is too late.
"THE THIRD YEAR THEY DO NOT GATHER
SHELLS."
The signs of the
times show plainly
enough what is going
to happen. All
the savage lands in
the world are going
to be brought
under
subjection to the
Christian governments
of Europe. I
am not sorry, but
glad. This coming
fate might have been
a calamity to those
savage peoples two
hundred years ago;
but now it
will in
some cases be a benefaction.
The sooner
the seizure is consummated,
the better
for the savages.
The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and
oppression will give place to peace and order and the reign of
law. When one considers what India was under her Hindoo
and Mohammedan rulers, and what she is now; when he remembers
the miseries of her millions then and the protections
and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that
the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire
was the establishment of British supremacy there. The savage
lands of the world are to pass to alien possession, their peoples
to the mercies of alien rulers. Let us hope and believe that
they will all benefit by the change.
April 23. "The first year they gather shells; the second
year
they gather shells and drink; the third year they do not
gather shells." (Said
of immigrants to Mauritius.)
Population 375,000. 120 sugar factories.
A STEVEDORE.
Population 1851, 185,000. The increase is due mainly to
the introduction of Indian
coolies.
They now apparently form the
great majority of the population.
They
are admirable breeders; their
homes are always hazy with children.
Great savers of money. A
British officer told me that in India
he paid his servant 10 rupees a
month, and he had 11 cousins,
uncles,
parents, etc., dependent
upon him, and he supported them
on his wages. These
thrifty coolies
are said to be acquiring land a trifle
at a time, and cultivating
it; and
may own the island by and by.
The Indian women do very
hard labor for wages running from 40 1/100 of a rupee for
twelve
hours' work, to 50 1/100. They carry mats of sugar on their heads
(70 pounds) all day lading ships, for half a rupee, and work at
gardening all day for less.
The camaron is a fresh water creature like a cray-fish. It
is regarded here as the
world's chiefest delicacy—and certainly
it is good. Guards patrol the streams to prevent poaching
it. A fine of Rs. 200 or 300 (they say) for poaching. Bait
is
thrown in the water; the camaron goes for it; the fisher
drops his loop in and works it
around and about the camaron
he has selected, till he gets it over its tail; then
there's a jerk
or something to certify the camaron that it is his turn now; he
suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his
person and draws it taut,
and his days are ended.
Another dish, called palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings
and tastes like green
almonds; is very delicate and good.
Costs the life of a palm tree 12 to 20 years
old—for it is the
pith.
Another dish—looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed—is
a preparation of the deadly nightshade. Good
enough.
The monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the
toy mountains, and they
flock down nights and raid the sugar-fields.
Also on
other estates they come down and destroy a
sort of bean-crop—just for fun,
apparently—tear off the pods
and throw them down
The cyclone of 1892 tore down two great blocks of stone
buildings in the center of
Port Louis—the chief architectural
feature—and left the uncomely
and apparently frail blocks
standing. Everywhere in its track it annihilated houses,
tore
off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. The men were in the
towns, the women
and children at home in the country getting
crippled, killed, frightened to insanity;
and the rain deluging
them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning
glaring. This for an hour or so. Then a lull and sunshine;
many ventured out of safe shelter; then suddenly here it came
again from the opposite point and renewed and completed the
devastation. It is said the Chinese fed the sufferers for days
on free rice.
A CYCLONE.
Whole streets in Port Louis were laid flat—wrecked.
During a minute and a
half the wind blew 123 miles an hour;
no official record made after that, when it may
have reached
150. It cut down an obelisk. It carried an American ship
into the
woods after breaking the chains of two anchors. They
now use four—two
forward, two astern. Common report
says it killed 1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an
hour. Then
came the lull of the central calm—people did not know the
barometer was still going down—then suddenly all perdition
broke loose again
while people were rushing around seeking
friends and rescuing the wounded. The noise was
comparable
to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and cannon,
and these are feeble in comparison.
What there is of Mauritius is beautiful. You have undulating
wide expanses of sugar-cane—a fine, fresh green and very
pleasant to
the eye; and everywhere else you have a ragged
luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid
greens of varying
shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms
lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you have
stretches of shady dense
forest with limpid streams frolicking
through them, continually glimpsed and lost and
glimpsed
again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have
some tiny
mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of
toy peaks, and a dainty little
vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here
and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white
ruffle
of surf breaks into the view.
That is Mauritius; and pretty enough. The details are few,
the massed result is
charming, but not imposing; not riotous,
not exciting; it is a Sunday landscape.
Perspective, and the
enchantments wrought by distance, are wanting. There are
no
distances; there is no perspective, so to speak. Fifteen
miles as the crow flies is the
usual limit of vision. Mauritius is
a garden and a park combined. It affects one's
emotions as
parks and gardens affect them. The surfaces of one's spiritual
deeps
are pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not
reached, not stirred.
Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense
of mystery which haunts apparently
inaccessible mountain domes
and summits reposing in the sky—these are the
things which
exalt the spirit and move it to see visions and dream dreams.
The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing
in the matter of tropical
islands. I would add another story
to Mauna Loa's 16,000 feet if I could, and make it
particularly
bold and steep and craggy and forbidding and snowy; and I
would make
the volcano spout its lava-floods out of its summit
instead of its sides; but aside from
these non-essentials I have
no corrections to suggest. I hope these will be attended to;
I
do not wish to have to speak of it again.
CHAPTER LXIV.
When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it
in
the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in
these seas. She
is thoroughly modern, and that statement
covers a great deal of ground. She has the
usual defect, the common defect, the
universal defect, the
defect that has never been missing from any ship that ever
sailed—she has imperfect beds. Many ships have good beds,
but no ship has very good ones. In the matter of beds all
ships have been badly
edited, ignorantly edited, from the
beginning. The selection of the beds is given to
some hearty,
strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a
frail
woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and
insomnia. Nothing is so rare, on either
side of the ocean, as a
perfect bed; nothing is so difficult to make. Some of the
hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever
did. In Noah's Ark the
beds were simply scandalous. Noah
set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of
modification
or another till the next flood.
8 A.M. Passing Isle de Bourbon. Broken-up sky-line of
volcanic
mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost
much to repair them, and it seems
inexcusable neglect to leave
them as they are.
It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest. It is
no proper rest for the mind
to clatter from town to town in
the dust and cinders, and examine galleries and
architecture,
and be always meeting people and lunching and teaing and
dining, and receiving worrying cables and letters. And a sea
voyage on the Atlantic is of no use—voyage too short, sea
too rough. The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the
long stretches of time are the healing thing.
STUPIDITY IN EUROPE.
May 2, A.M. A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first
we
have seen in these weeks of lonely voyaging. We are now
in the Mozambique Channel,
between Madagascar and South
Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa Bay.
Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was
standing telling a spirited
seafaring tale, and had reached the
most exciting place, where a man overboard was
washing
swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting despairing cries,
everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and fading
hope, when the band, which had
been silent a moment, began
impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem.
As simply as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he
stopped his story,
uncovered, laid his laced cap against his
breast, and slightly bent his grizzled head.
The few bars finished,
he put on his cap and took up his
tale again as naturally
as if that interjection of music had been a part of it. There
was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving
to reflect that he was
one of a myriad, scattered over every
part of the globe, who by turn was doing as he was
doing
every hour of the twenty-four—those awake doing it while
the
others slept—those impressive bars forever floating up
out of the various
climes, never silent and never lacking reverent
listeners.
All that I remember about Madagascar is that Thackeray's
little Billie went up to the
top of the mast and there knelt
him upon his knee, saying, "I see
May 3. Sunday. Fifteen or twenty Africanders who will
end their
voyage to-day and strike for their several homes
from Delagoa Bay to-morrow, sat up
singing on the afterdeck
in the moonlight till 3 A.M. Good fun and wholesome.
And the songs were clean
songs, and some of them were hallowed
by tender associations. Finally, in a pause, a man
asked, "Have you heard about
the fellow that kept a diary
crossing the Atlantic?" It was a discord, a wet blanket.
The men were not in the mood for humorous dirt. The songs
GOOD FUN AND WHOLESOME.
had carried them to their homes, and in spirit they sat by
those far hearthstones, and saw faces and heard voices other
than those that were about them. And so this disposition to
drag in an old indecent anecdote got no welcome; nobody
answered. The poor man hadn't wit enough to see that he
had blundered, but asked his question again. Again there
was no response. It was embarrassing for him. In his confusion
he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing—
began the anecdote. Began it in a deep and hostile stillness,
where had been such life and stir and warm comradeship
before. He delivered himself of the brief details of the diary's
first day, and did it with some confidence and a fair degree of
eagerness. It fell flat. There was an awkward pause. The
two rows of men sat like statues. There was no movement,
no sound. He had to go on; there was no other way, at least
none that an animal of his calibre could think of. At the
close of each day's diary the same dismal silence followed.
When at last he finished his tale and sprung the indelicate
surprise which is wont to fetch a crash of laughter, not a
ripple of sound resulted. It was as if the tale had been told
to dead men. After what seemed a long, long time, somebody
sighed, somebody else stirred in his seat; presently, the men
dropped into a low murmur of confidential talk, each with his
neighbor, and the incident was closed. There were indications
that that man was fond of his anecdote; that it was his
pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his reputation-maker.
But he will never tell it again. No doubt he will
think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped; and
then he will see a picture, and always the same picture—the
double rank of dead men; the vacant deck stretching away in
dimming perspective beyond them, the wide desert of smooth
sea all abroad; the rim of the moon spying from behind a rag
of black cloud; the remote top of the mizzenmast shearing a
zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space;
and this soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in
the midst of it and told his poor little tale and felt so lonesome
when he got through.
INDIANS AND CHINAMEN.
Fifty Indians and Chinamen asleep in a big tent in the waist
of the ship forward; they
lie side by side with no space between;
the former wrapped
up, head and all, as in the Indian
streets, the Chinamen uncovered; the lamp and things
for
opium smoking in the center.
A passenger said it was ten 2-ton truck loads of dynamite
that lately exploded at
Johannesburg. Hundreds killed; he
doesn't know how many; limbs picked up for miles
around.
Glass shattered, and roofs swept away or collapsed 200 yards
off; fragment
of iron flung three and a half miles.
It occurred at 3 P. M.; at 6, £65,000 had been subscribed.
When this
passenger left, £35,000 had been voted by city and
state governments and
£100,000 by citizens and business corporations.
When news of the disaster was telephoned to the
Exchange £35,000 were
subscribed in the first five minutes.
Subscribing was still going on when he left; the
papers had
ceased the names, only the amounts—too many names; not
enough room. £100,000 subscribed by companies and citizens;
if this is true,
it must be what they call in Australia "a record"
—the biggest instance of a
spontaneous outpour for charity in
history, considering the size of the population it
was drawn
from, $8 or $10 for each white resident, babies at the breast
included.
Monday, May 4. Steaming slowly in the stupendous Delagoa
Bay, its dim arms stretching far away and disappearing
on both sides. It could
furnish plenty of room for all the
ships in the world, but it is shoal. The lead has
given us 3½
fathoms several times and we are drawing that, lacking 6
inches.
A bold headland—precipitous wall, 150 feet high, very
strong, red color,
stretching a mile or so. A man said it was
Portuguese blood—battle fought
here with the natives last
year. I think this doubtful. Pretty cluster of houses on the
tableland above the red—and rolling stretches of grass and
groups of
trees, like England.
The Portuguese have the railroad (one passenger train a
day) to the
border—70 miles—then the Netherlands Company
have it. Thousands of tons of freight on the shore—no
cover. This is
Portuguese all over—indolence, piousness, poverty,
impotence.
Crews of small boats and tugs, all jet black woolly heads
and very muscular.
Winter. The South African winter is just beginning now,
but nobody but an expert can tell it from summer. However,
I am tired of summer; we have had it unbroken for eleven
months. We spent the afternoon on shore, Delagoa Bay. A
small town—no sights. No carriages. Three 'rickshas, but
we couldn't get them—apparently private. These Portuguese
are a rich brown, like some of the Indians. Some
of the blacks have the long horse heads and very
long chins of the negroes of the picture
books; but most of them are exactly like
the negroes of our Southern States—
round faces, flat noses, good-natured,
and easy laughers.
LIKE OUR SOUTHERN NEGROES.
Flocks of black
women passed along,
carrying outrageously heavy
bags of
freight on
their heads—the quiver of
their leg as the foot was
planted and the strain exhibited
by their bodies showed
what a tax upon their strength the
load was. They
were stevedores,
and doing full steve-dore's work.
Theywere very erect when unladen—from
carry-ing weights
on their heads—just like the
Indian women. It
gives them a
proud, fine carriage.
Sometimes one saw a woman carrying on her head a laden
and top-heavy basket the shape
of an inverted pyramid—its
top the size of a soup-plate, its base the
diameter of a teacup.
It required nice balancing—and got it.
No bright colors; yet there were a good many Hindoos.
The Second Class Passenger came over as usual at "lights
out" (11)
and we lounged along the spacious vague solitudes
of the deck and smoked the peaceful
pipe and talked. He told
me an incident in Mr. Barnum's life which was evidently characteristic
of that great showman in several ways:
This was Barnum's purchase of Shakespeare's birthplace, a
quarter of a century ago.
The Second Class Passenger was in
Jamrach's employ at the time and knew Barnum well. He
said the thing began in this way. One morning Barnum and
Jamrach were in Jamrach's
little private snuggery back of the
wilderness of caged monkeys and snakes and other
commonplaces
of Jamrach's stock in trade, refreshing themselves after
an arduous stroke of
business, Jamrach with something orthodox,
Barnum with
something heterodox—for Barnum was a
teetotaler. The stroke of business was
in the elephant line.
Jamrach had contracted to deliver to Barnum in New York 18
elephants for $360,000 in time for the next season's opening.
Then it occurred to Mr.
Barnum that he needed a "card." He
suggested Jumbo. Jamrach said he would have to think
of
something else—Jumbo couldn't be had; the Zoo wouldn't
part with
that elephant. Barnum said he was willing to pay
a fortune for Jumbo if he could get
him. Jamrach said it was
no use to think about it; that Jumbo was as popular as the
Prince of Wales and the Zoo wouldn't dare to sell him; all
England would be
outraged at the idea; Jumbo was an English
institution; he was part of the national
glory; one might as
well think of buying the Nelson monument. Barnum spoke
up with
vivacity and said—
"It's a first-rate idea. I'll buy the Monument."
Jamrach was speechless for a second. Then he said, like
one ashamed—
"You caught me. I was napping. For a moment I
thought you were in earnest."
Barnum said pleasantly—
"I was in earnest. I know they won't sell it, but no matter,
I will not throw away a good idea for all that. All I
want is a big advertisement. I will keep the thing in mind,
and if nothing better
turns up I will offer to buy it. That will
answer every purpose. It will furnish me a
couple of columns
of gratis advertising in every English and American paper for
a
couple of months, and give my show the biggest boom a
show ever had in this world."
BARNUM'S CHANCE
Jamrach started to deliver a burst of admiration, but was
interrupted by Barnum, who
said—
"Here is a state of things! England ought to blush."
His eye had fallen upon something in the newspaper. He
read it through to himself,
then read it aloud. It said that
the house that Shakespeare was born in at
Stratford-on-Avon
was falling gradually to ruin through neglect; that the room
where the poet first saw the light was now serving as a
butcher's shop; that all appeals to England to contribute
money (the requisite sum stated) to buy and repair the house
and place it in the care of salaried and trustworthy keepers
had fallen resultless. Then Barnum said—
"There's my chance. Let Jumbo and the Monument alone
for the
present—they'll keep. I'll buy Shakespeare's house.
I'll set it up in my
Museum in New York and put a glass case
around it and make a sacred thing of it; and
you'll see all
America flock there to worship; yes, and pilgrims from the
whole
earth; and I'll make them take their hats off, too. In
America we know how to value
anything that Shakespeare's
touch has made holy. You'll see."
In conclusion the S. C. P. said:
"That is the way the thing came about. Barnum did buy
Shakespeare's house. He paid the
price asked, and received
the properly attested documents of sale. Then there was an
explosion, I can tell you. England rose! What, the birthplace
of the master-genius of all the ages and all the climes—
that priceless
possession of Britain—to be carted out of the
country like so much old lumber
and set up for sixpenny desecration
in a Yankee show-shop—the idea was not to be tolerated
for a moment. England rose in her indignation, and
Barnum was glad to relinquish
his prize and offer apologies.
However, he stood out for a compromise; he claimed a concession—England
must let him have Jumbo. And England
consented, but not cheerfully."
It shows how, by help of time, a story can grow—even
after Barnum has had
the first innings in the telling of it.
Mr. Barnum told me the story himself, years ago.
He said
that the permission to buy Jumbo was not a concession; the
purchase was made and the animal delivered before the public
knew anything about it. Also, that the securing of Jumbo
was all the advertisement he needed. It produced many
columns of newspaper talk, free of cost, and he was satisfied.
He said that if he had failed to get Jumbo he would have
caused his notion of buying the Nelson Monument to be treacherously
smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after
he had gotton a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising
out of it, he would have come out with a blundering, obtuse,
but warm-hearted letter of apology, and in a postscript to it
would have naïvely proposed to let the Monument go, and
take Stonehenge in place of it at the same price.
It was his opinion that such a letter, written with well-simulated
asinine innocence and gush would have gotten his
ignorance and stupidity an amount
of newspaper abuse worth
six fortunes to him, and not purchasable for twice the money.
I knew Mr. Barnum well, and I placed every confidence in
the account which he gave me
of the Shakespeare birthplace
episode. He said he found the house neglected and going to
decay, and he inquired into the matter and was told that many
times earnest
efforts had been made to raise money for its
proper repair and preservation, but without
success. He then
proposed to buy it. The proposition was entertained, and a
price
named—$50,000, I think; but whatever it was, Barnum
paid the money down,
without remark, and the papers were
drawn up and executed. He said that it had been his
purpose
to set up the house in his Museum, keep it in repair, protect it
from
name-scribblers and other desecrators, and leave it by
bequest to the safe and perpetual
guardianship of the Smithsonian
Institute at Washington.
But as soon as it was found that Shakespeare's house had
passed into foreign hands and
was going to be carried across
the ocean, England was stirred as no appeal from the custodians
of the relic had ever stirred England before, and protests
came flowing in—and money, too, to stop the outrage. Offers
of re-purchase were made—offers of double the money that
Mr. Barnum had paid for the house. He handed the house
back, but took only the sum which it had cost him—but on the
condition that an endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding
and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised.
This condition was fulfilled.
That was Barnum's account of the episode; and to the end
of his days he claimed with
pride and satisfaction that not
England, but America—represented by
him—saved the birthplace
of Shakespeare from destruction.
At 3 P.M., May 6th, the ship slowed down, off the land, and
thoughtfully and
cautiously picked her way into the snug
harbor of Durban, South Africa.
CHAPTER LXV.
In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Royal Hotel. Comfortable, good table, good service
of natives
and Madrasis. Curious jumble of modern
and ancient city and village, primitiveness and
the other thing.
Electric bells, but they don't ring. Asked why they didn't,
the
watchman in the office said he thought they must be out
of order; he thought so because
some of them rang, but most
of them didn't. Wouldn't it be a good idea to put them in
order? He hesitated—like one who isn't quite sure—then
conceded the point.
May 7. A bang on the door at 6. Did I want my boots
cleaned?
Fifteen minutes later another bang. Did we want
coffee? Fifteen later, bang again, my
wife's bath ready; 15
later, my bath ready. Two other bangs; I forget what they
were about. Then lots of shouting back and forth, among the
servants just as in an
Indian hotel.
Evening. At 4 P. M. it was unpleasantly warm. Half-hour
after
sunset one needed a spring overcoat; by 8 a winter one.
Durban is a neat and clean town. One notices that without
having his attention called to it.
Rickshaws drawn by splendidly built black Zulus, so overflowing
with strength, seemingly, that it is a pleasure, not a
pain, to see them snatch a
rickshaw along. They smile and
laugh and show their teeth—a good-natured lot.
Not allowed
to drink; 2s per hour for one person; 3s for two; 3d for a
course—one
person.
The chameleon in the hotel court. He is fat and indolent
and
contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a
fly comes
about—reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and
takes him in. He gums his
tongue first. He is always pious,
in his looks. And pious and thankful both, when
Providence
or one of us sends him a fly. He has a froggy head, and a
back like a
new grave—for shape; and hands like a bird's
toes that have been frostbitten.
But his eyes are his
exhibition feature.
A couple
of skinny cones project from
the sides of his head, with a
wee
shiny bead of an eye set
in the apex of each; and
these cones turn bodily like
pivot-guns and point every-which-way,
and they
are independent
of each other;
each has its own exclusive
machinery. When I am behind
him and C. in front of
him, he whirls one eye rearwards
and the other forwards
—which gives him a most
Congressional
expression (one eye on the constituency and one
on the swag); and then
if something happens above and below
him he shoots out one eye upward like a telescope
and the
other downward—and this changes his expression, but does
not
improve it.
A CONGRESSIONAL EXPRESSION.
Natives must not be out after the curfew bell without a
pass. In Natal there are ten
blacks to one white.
Sturdy plump creatures are the women. They comb their
wool up to a peak and keep it in
position by stiffening it with
brown-red clay—half of this tower colored, denotes engagement;
the whole of it colored denotes marriage.
None but heathen Zulus on the police; Christian ones not
allowed.
A FASHION IN HARI.
May 9. A drive yesterday with friends over the Berea.
Very fine
roads and lofty, overlooking the whole town, the
harbor, and the
sea—beautiful views. Residences all along,
set in the midst of green lawns
with shrubs and generally one
or two intensely red outbursts
of poinsettia—the
flaming splotch of blinding
red a stunning
contrast with
the world of surrounding
green. The cactus tree—
candelabrum-like; and one
twisted like gray writhing
serpents. The "flat-crown"
(should be flat-roof)—half a
dozen naked branches
full of
elbows, slant upward like artificial
supports, and fling a roof
of delicate foliage out in a
horizontal platform
as flat as a floor; and you look up through
this thin floor as through a green cobweb or
veil. The branches
are japanesich. All about you is a bewildering variety of unfamiliar
and beautiful trees; one sort wonderfully dense foliage
and very dark
green—so dark that you notice it at once, notwithstanding
there are so many orange trees. The "flamboyant"—not
in flower, now, but when in flower lives up to its
name, we are told. Another tree
with a lovely upright tassel
scattered among its rich greenery, red and glowing as a
fire-coal.
Here and there a gum-tree; half a dozen lofty
Norfolk
Island pines lifting their fronded arms skyward. Groups of
tall bamboo.
Saw one bird. Not many birds here, and they have no
music—and the flowers not much smell, they grow so fast.
Everything neat and trim and clean like the town. The
loveliest trees and the greatest
variety I have ever seen anywhere,
except approaching
Darjeeling. Have not heard anyone
call Natal the garden of South Africa, but that is what it
probably is.
It was when Bishop of Natal that Colenso raised such a
storm in the religious world.
The concerns of religion are a
vital matter here yet. A vigilant eye is kept upon
Sunday.
Museums and other dangerous resorts are not allowed to be
open. You may
sail on the Bay, but it is wicked to play
cricket. For a while a Sunday concert was
tolerated, upon
condition that it must be admission free and the money taken
by
collection. But the collection was alarmingly large and
that stopped the matter. They
are particular about babies.
A clergyman would not bury a child according to the sacred
rites because it had not been baptized. The Hindoo is more
liberal. He burns no
child under three, holding that it does
not need purifying.
The King of the Zulus, a fine fellow of 30, was banished six
years ago for a term of
seven years. He is occupying Napoleon's
old stand—St. Helena. The people are a little nervous
about having him
come back, and they may well be, for Zulu
kings have been terrible people
sometimes—like Tchaka,
Dingaan, and Cetewayo.
There is a large Trappist monastery two hours from Durban,
over the country roads, and in company with Mr. Milligan
and Mr. Hunter, general manager
of the Natal government
railways, who knew the heads of it, we went out to see it.
There it all was, just as one reads about it in books and
cannot believe that it is so—I mean the rough, hard work,
the impossible hours, the scanty food, the coarse raiment, the
Maryborough beds, the tabu of human speech, of social intercourse,
of relaxation, of amusement, of entertainment, of the
presence of woman in the men's establishment. There it all
was. It was not a dream, it was not a lie. And yet with the
fact before one's face it was still incredible. It is such a
sweeping suppression of human instincts, such an extinction of
the man as an individual.
La Trappe must have known the human race well. The
scheme which he invented hunts out
everything that a man
wants and values—and withholds it from him. Apparently
there is no detail that can help make life worth living that
has not been
carefully ascertained and placed out of the Trappist's
reach. La Trappe must have known that there were
men who would enjoy this kind of
misery, but how did he
find it out?
If he had consulted you or me he would have been told
that his scheme lacked too many
attractions; that it was impossible;
that it could never
be floated. But there in the
monastery was proof that he knew the human race better
than it knew itself. He set his foot upon every desire that
a man
has—yet he floated his project, and it has prospered
for two hundred years,
and will go on prospering forever, no
doubt.
Man likes personal distinction—there in the monastery it
is obliterated. He
likes delicious food—there he gets beans
and bread and tea, and not enough of
it. He likes to lie
softly—there he lies on a sand mattress, and has a pillow
and
a blanket, but no sheet. When he is dining, in a great company
of friends, he likes to laugh and chat—there a monk
reads a holy book
aloud during meals, and nobody speaks or
laughs. When a man has a hundred friends about
him, evenings,
THE SUPPRESSION OF HUMAN INSTINCTS.
he likes to have a good time and run late—there he and
the rest go silently to bed at 8; and in the dark, too; there is
but a loose brown robe to discard, there are no night-clothes to
put on, a light is not needed. Man likes to lie abed late—
there he gets up once or twice in the night to perform some
religious office, and gets up finally for the day at two in the
morning. Man likes light work or none at all—there he
labors all day in the field, or in the blacksmith shop or the
other shops devoted to the mechanical trades, such as shoemaking,
saddlery, carpentry, and soon. Man likes the society of
girls and women—there he never has it. He likes to have
his children about him, and pet them and play with them—
there he has none. He likes billiards—there is no table there.
He likes outdoor sports and indoor dramatic and musical and
social entertainments—there are none there. He likes to bet
on things—I was told that betting is forbidden there. When
a man's temper is up he likes to pour it out upon somebody—
there this is not allowed. A man likes animals—pets; there
are none there. He likes to smoke—there he cannot do it.
He likes to read the news—no papers or magazines come
there. A man likes to know how his parents and brothers and
sisters are getting along when he is away, and if they miss him
—there he cannot know. A man likes a pretty house, and
pretty furniture, and pretty things, and pretty colors—there
he has nothing but naked aridity and sombre colors. A man
likes—name it yourself: whatever it is, it is absent from that
place.
From what I could learn, all that a man gets for this is
merely the saving of his
soul.
It all seems strange, incredible, impossible. But La Trappe
knew the race. He knew the
powerful attraction of unattractiveness;
he knew
that no life could be imagined, howsoever
comfortless and forbidding, but somebody would
want to try it.
This parent establishment of Germans began its work fifteen
years ago, strangers, poor, and unencouraged; it owns
15,000 acres of land now,
and raises grain and fruit, and makes
wines, and manufactures all manner of things, and
has native
apprentices in its shops, and sends them forth able to read and
write,
and also well equipped to earn their living by their
trades. And this young
establishment has set up eleven
branches in South Africa, and in them they are
christianizing
and educating and teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades
to 1,200
boys and girls. Protestant Missionary work is coldly
regarded by the commercial white
colonist all over the heathen
world, as a rule, and its product is nicknamed
"rice-Christians"
(occupationless incapables who join the church for revenue
only), but I think it would be difficult to pick a flaw in the
work of
these Catholic monks, and I believe that the disposition
to attempt it has not shown itself.
Tuesday, May 12. Transvaal politics in a confused condition.
First the sentencing of the Johannesburg Reformers
startled England by its severity; on the top of this came
Kruger's exposure of the
cipher correspondence, which showed
that the invasion of the Transvaal, with the design
of seizing
that country and adding it to the British Empire, was planned
by Cecil
Rhodes and Beit—which made a revulsion in English
feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the
Chartered Company for
degrading British honor. For a good
while I couldn't seem to get at a clear
comprehension of it, it
was so tangled. But at last by patient study I have managed
it, I believe. As I understand it, the Uitlanders and other
Dutchmen were
dissatisfied because the English would not
allow them to take any part in the government
except to pay
taxes. Next, as I understand it, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Jameson,
not
having been able to make the medical business pay, made
a raid into Matabeleland with
the intention of capturing the
capital, Johannesburg, and holding the women and children to
ransom until the Uitlanders and the other Boers should grant
to them and the Chartered Company the political rights which
had been withheld from them. They would have succeeded in
this great scheme, as I understand it, but for the interference
of Cecil Rhodes and Mr. Beit, and other Chiefs of the Matabele,
who persuaded their countrymen to revolt and throw off
their allegiance to Germany. This, in turn, as I understand
it, provoked the King of Abyssinia to destroy the Italian army
and fall back upon Johannesburg; this at the instigation of
Rhodes, to bull the stock market.
CHAPTER LXVI.
Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.—
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
I scribbled in my note-book a year ago the paragraph
which ends the preceding chapter, it was
meant to indicate, in an extravagant
form, two
things: the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by
the
citizen to the stranger concerning South African politics,
and the resulting confusion
created in the stranger's mind
thereby.
But it does not seem so very extravagant now. Nothing
could in that disturbed and
excited time make South African
politics clear or quite rational to the citizen of the
country because
his personal interest and his political prejudices were in
his way; and nothing
could make those politics clear or
rational to the stranger, the sources of his
information being
such as they were.
I was in South Africa some little time. When I arrived
there the political pot was
boiling fiercely. Four months previously,
Jameson had
plunged over the Transvaal border with
about 600 armed horsemen at his back, to go to
the "relief of
the women and children" of Johannesburg; on the fourth day
of his
march the Boers had defeated him in battle, and carried
him and his men to Pretoria, the
capital, as prisoners; the Boer
government had turned Jameson and his officers over to
the
British government for trial, and shipped them to England;
next, it had
arrested 64 important citizens of Johannesburg as
raid-conspirators, condemned their
four leaders to death, then
THE POLITICAL POT.
commuted the sentences, and now the 64 were waiting, in jail,
for further results. Before midsummer they were all out excepting
two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; 58
had been fined $10,000 each and enlarged, and the four leaders
had gotten off with fines of $125,000 each—with permanent
exile added, in one case.
Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger,
and I was glad to be in the
thick of the excitement. Everybody
was talking, and I expected to understand the whole of
one side of it in a very little while.
I was disappointed. There were singularities, perplexities,
unaccountabilities about
it which I was not able to master. I
had no personal access to Boers—their
side was a secret to me,
aside from what I was able to gather of it from published
statements. My sympathies were soon with the Reformers in
the Pretoria jail, with their
friends, and with their cause. By
diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found
out—apparently—
all the details of their side of the quarrel
except one—what
they expected to accomplish by an armed
rising.
Nobody seemed to know.
The reason why the Reformers were discontented and
wanted some changes made, seemed
quite clear. In Johannesburg
it was claimed that the Uitlanders (strangers, foreigners)
paid
thirteen-fifteenths of the Transvaal taxes, yet got little or
nothing for it. Their city
had no charter; it had no municipal
government; it could levy no taxes for drainage,
water-supply,
paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing. There was a police
force,
but it was composed of Boers, it was furnished by the
State Government, and the city had
no control over it. Mining
was very costly; the government enormously increased the
cost by putting
burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output,
the machinery, the buildings; by burdensome
imposts
upon incoming materials; by burdensome railway-freight-charges.
Hardest of all to bear, the government reserved to
itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and
burdened it with an extravagant price. The detested Hollander
from over the water held all the public offices. The
government was rank with corruption. The Uitlander had no
vote, and must live in the State ten or twelve years before he
could get one. He was not represented in the Read (legislature)
that oppressed him and fleeced him. Religion was not
free. There were no schools where the teaching was in English,
yet the great majority of the white population of the
State knew no tongue but that. The State would not pass a
liquor law; but allowed a great trade in cheap vile brandy
among the blacks, with the result that 25 per cent. of the
50,000 blacks employed in the mines were usually drunk and
incapable of working.
There—it was plain enough that the reasons for wanting
some changes made were abundant and reasonable, if this statement
of the existing grievances was correct.
What the Uitlanders wanted was reform—under the existing
Republic.
What they proposed to do was to secure these reforms by
prayer, petition, and persuasion.
They did petition. Also, they issued a Manifesto, whose
very first note is a
bugle-blast of loyalty: "We want the
establishment of this Republic as a true Republic."
Could anything be clearer than the Uitlander's statement
of the grievances and
oppressions under which they were
suffering? Could anything be more legal and
citizenlike and
law-respecting than their attitude as expressed by their Manifesto?
No. Those things were perfectly clear, perfectly
comprehensible.
But at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions
begin to flock in. You have arrived at a place which you cannot
quite understand.
For you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful,
and in every way
unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government
to right their grievances, the Uitlanders had smuggled
a Maxim gun or two and 1,500 muskets into the town,
concealed in oil tanks and
coal cars, and had begun to form
and drill military companies composed of clerks,
merchants,
and citizens generally.
What was their idea? Did they suppose that the Boers
would attack them for petitioning for redress? That could
not be.
Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them even
for issuing a Manifesto demanding relief under the existing
government?
Yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of
talk of forcing the government to grant redress if it were not
granted
peacefully.
The Reformers were men of high intelligence. If they
were in earnest, they were taking
extraordinary risks. They
had enormously valuable properties to defend; their town was
full of women and children; their mines and compounds were
packed with thousands
upon thousands of sturdy blacks. If
the Boers attacked, the mines would close, the
blacks would
swarm out and get drunk; riot and conflagration and the Boers
together might lose the Reformers more in a day, in money,
blood, and suffering, than
the desired political relief could compensate
in ten years if they won the fight and secured the
reforms.
It is May, 1897, now; a year has gone by, and the confusions
of that day have been to a considerable degree cleared
away. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Dr.
Jameson, and others responsible
for the Raid, have testified before the Parliamentary
Committee
of Inquiry in London, and so have Mr. Lionel Phillips and
other Johannesburg Reformers, monthly-nurses of the Revolution
which was born dead. These testimonies have thrown
light. Three books have been added much to this light:
"South Africa As It Is," by Mr. Statham, an able writer
partial to the Boers; "The Story of an African Crisis,"
by Mr. Garrett, a brilliant writer partial to Rhodes; and "A
Woman's Part in a Revolution," by Mrs. John Hays Hammond,
a vigorous and vivid diarist, partial to the Reformers.
By liquifying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of
the prejudiced parliamentary witnesses and stirring the whole
together and pouring it into my own (prejudiced) moulds, I
have got at the truth of that puzzling South African situation,
which is this:
1. The capitalists and other chief men of Johannesburg
were fretting under various
political and financial burdens imposed
by the State (the South African Republic, sometimes
called "the
Transvaal") and desired to procure by peaceful
means a modification of the
laws.
2. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Premier of the British Cape Colony,
millionaire, creator and
managing director of the territorially-immense
and financially unproductive South Africa Company;
projector of vast schemes for
the unification and consolidation of
all the South African States into one imposing
commonwealth
or empire under the shadow and general protection of the
British
flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make profitable
use of the Uitlander discontent
above mentioned—make the
Johannesburg cat help pull out one of his
consolidation chestnuts
for him. With this view he set himself the task of warming
the lawful and legitimate petitions and supplications of the
Uitlanders into
seditious talk, and their frettings into threatenings—the
final outcome to be revolt and armed rebellion.
If he could bring about a bloody
collision between those people
and the Boer government, Great Britain would have to interfere;
her interference would be resisted by the Boers; she
would chastise them and add the Transvaal to her South African
possessions. It was not a foolish idea, but a rational and
practical one.
After a couple of years of judicious plotting, Mr. Rhodes
had his reward; the
revolutionary kettle was briskly boiling in
Johannesburg, and the Uitlander leaders were
backing their
appeals to the government—now hardened into demands—
by threats of force and bloodshed. By the middle of December,
1895, the explosion seemed imminent. Mr. Rhodes was
diligently
helping, from his distant post in Cape Town. He
was helping to procure arms for
Johannesburg; he was also
arranging to have Jameson break over the border and come to
Johannesburg with 600 mounted men at his back. Jameson—
as per
instructions from Rhodes, perhaps—wanted a letter
from the Reformers
requesting him to come to their aid. It
was a good idea. It would throw a considerable
share of the
responsibility of his invasion upon the Reformers. He got the
letter—that famous one urging him to fly to the rescue of the
women and
children. He got it two months before he flew.
The Reformers seem
to have thought it over and concluded
that they had not done wisely; for the next day
after giving
Jameson the implicating document they wanted to withdraw
it and leave
the women and children in danger; but they were
told that it was too late. The original
had gone to Mr. Rhodes
at the Cape. Jameson had kept a copy, though.
From that time until the 29th of December, a good deal of
the Reformers' time was
taken up with energetic efforts to
keep Jameson from coming to their assistance.
Jameson's invasion
had been set for the 26th. The Reformers were not
ready. The town was not united.
Some wanted a fight,
some wanted peace; some wanted a new government, some
wanted the existing one reformed; apparently very few wanted
the revolution to take place in the interest and under the ultimate
shelter of the Imperial flag—British; yet a report began
to spread that Mr. Rhodes's embarrassing assistance had for its
end this latter object.
Jameson was away up on the frontier tugging at his leash,
fretting to burst over the
border. By hard work the Reformers
got his starting-date postponed a little, and wanted to get
it postponed eleven
days. Apparently, Rhodes's agents were
seconding their efforts—in fact
wearing out the telegraph
wires trying to hold him back. Rhodes was himself the only
man who could have effectively postponed Jameson, but that
would have been a
disadvantage to his scheme; indeed, it could
spoil his whole two years' work.
Jameson endured postponement three days, then resolved
to wait no longer. Without any
orders—excepting Mr.
Rhodes's significant silence—he cut the
telegraph wires on the
29th, and made his plunge that night, to go to the rescue of the
women and children, by urgent request of a letter now nine
days old—as
per date,—a couple of months old, in fact. He
read the letter to his men, and
it affected them. It did not affect
all of them alike. Some saw in it a piece of piracy of
doubtful wisdom, and were
sorry to find that they had been
assembled to violate friendly territory instead of to
raid native
kraals, as they had supposed.
Jameson would have to ride 150 miles. He knew that there
were suspicions abroad in the
Transvaal concerning him, but he
expected to get through to Johannesburg before they
should
become general and obstructive. But a telegraph wire had
been overlooked
and not cut. It spread the news of his invasion
far and wide, and a few hours after his start the Boer
farmers were riding hard
from every direction to intercept
him.
BOER WAR SCENES.
As soon as it was known in Johannesburg that he was on
his way to rescue the women and
children, the grateful people
put the women and children in a train and rushed them for
Australia. In fact, the approach of Johannesburg's saviour created
panic and consternation there, and a multitude of males
of peaceable disposition
swept to the trains like a sand-storm.
The carly ones fared best; they secured
seats—by sitting in
them—eight hours before the first train was
timed to leave.
Mr. Rhodes lost no time. He cabled the renowned Johannesburg
letter of invitation to the London press—the gray-headedest
piece of ancient history that ever went over a cable.
The new poet laureate lost no time. He came out with a
rousing poem lauding Jameson's
prompt and splendid heroism
in flying to the rescue of the women and children; for the
poet
could not know that he did not fly until two months after the
invitation. He
was deceived by the false date of the letter,
which was December 20th.
Jameson was intercepted by the Boers on New Year's Day,
and on the next day he
surrendered. He had carried his copy
of the letter along, and if his instructions
required him—in
case of emergency—to see that it fell into the
hands of the
Boers, he loyally carried them out. Mrs. Hammond gives him
a sharp
rap for his supposed carelessness, and emphasizes her
feeling about it with burning
italics: "It was picked up on the
battle-field in a leathern pouch, supposed to be Dr.
Jameson's
saddle-bag. Why, in the name of all that is discreet and
honorable,
didn't he eat it!"
She requires too much. He was not in the service of the
Reformers—excepting
ostensibly; he was in the service of Mr.
Rhodes. It was the only plain English document,
undarkened
by ciphers and mysteries, and responsibly signed and authenticated,
which squarely implicated the Reformers in
the raid, and
it was not to Mr. Rhodes's interest that it should be caten. Besides,
that letter was not the original, it was only a copy. Mr.
Rhodes had the original—and didn't eat it. He cabled it to
the London press. It had already been read in England and
America and all over Europe before Jameson dropped it on the
battlefield. If the subordinate's knuckles deserved a rap, the
principal's deserved as many as a couple of them.
That letter is a juicily dramatic incident and is entitled to
all its celebrity,
because of the odd and variegated effects which
it produced. All within the space of a
single week it had made
Jameson an illustrious hero in England, a pirate in Pretoria,
and an ass without discretion or honor in Johannesburg; also
it had produced a
poet-laureatic explosion of colored fireworks
which filled the world's sky with giddy
splendors, and the
knowledge that Jameson was coming with it to rescue the
women
and children emptied Johannesburg of that detail of
the population. For an old letter,
this was much. For a letter
two months old, it did marvels; if it had been a year old it
would have done
miracles.
CHAPTER LXVII.
First catch your Boer, then kick him. —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
latter days were days of bitter worry and
trouble for
the harassed Reformers.
From Mrs. Hammond we learn that on the 31st (the
day after Johannesburg heard
of the invasion), "the Reform
Committee repudiates Dr. Jameson's inroad."
It also publishes its intention to adhere to the Manifesto.
It also earnestly desires that the inhabitants shall refrain
from overt acts against
the Boer government.
It also "distributes arms" at the Court House, and furnishes
horses "to the newly-enrolled volunteers."
It also brings a Transvaal flag into the committee-room,
and the entire body swear
allegiance to it "with uncovered
heads and upraised arms."
Also "one thousand Lee-Metford rifles have been given
out"—to rebels.
Also, in a speech, Reformer Lionel Phillips informs the
public that the Reform
Committee Delegation has "been received
with courtesy by the Government Commission," and
"been assured that their
proposals shall be earnestly considered."
That "while the
Reform Committee regretted Jameson's
precipitate action, they would stand by him."
Also the populace are in a state of "wild enthusiasm," and
"can scarcely be
restrained; they want to go out to meet
Jameson and bring him in with triumphal outcry."
Also the British High Commissioner has issued a damnifying
proclamation against Jameson and all British abettors of
his game. It arrives
January 1st.
It is a difficult position for the Reformers, and full of himdrances
and perplexities. Their duty is hard, but plain:
inroader.2. They have to swear allegiance to the Boer government,
and distribute cavalry horses to the rebels.3. They have to forbid overt acts against the Boer government,
and distribute arms to its enemies.4. They have to avoid collision with the British government,
but still stand by Jameson and their new oath of allegiance
to the Boer government, taken, uncovered, in presence of
its flag.
They did such of these things as they could; they tried to
do them all; in fact, did
do them all, but only in turn, not
simultaneously. In the nature of things they could
not be
made to simultane.
In preparing for armed revolution and in talking revolution,
were the Reformers "bluffing," or were they in earnest?
If they were in earnest,
they were taking great risks—as has
been already pointed out. A gentleman of
high position told
me in Johannesburg that he had in his possession a printed
document proclaiming a new government and naming its president—one
of the Reform leaders. He said that this proclamation
had been ready for issue, but was suppressed when the
raid collapsed. Perhaps I
misunderstood him. Indeed, I must
have misunderstood him, for I have not seen mention of
this
large incident in print anywhere.
Besides, I hope I am mistaken; for, if I am, then there is
argument that the Reformers
were privately not serious, but
were only trying to scare the Boer government into
granting
the desired reforms.
The Boer government was scared, and it had a right to be.
For
if Mr. Rhodes's plan was to provoke a collision that would
compel the interference of England, that was a serious matter.
If it could be shown that that was also the Reformers' plan
and purpose, it would prove that they had marked out a
feasible project, at any rate, although it was one which could
hardly fail to cost them ruinously before England should
arrive. But it seems clear that they had no such plan nor
desire. If, when the worst should come to the worst, they
meant to overthrow the government, they also meant to inherit
the assets themselves, no doubt.
This scheme could hardly have succeeded. With an army
of Boers at their gates and
50,000 riotous blacks in their midst,
the odds against success would have been too
heavy—even if
the whole town had been armed. With only 2,500 rifles in
the place, they stood really no chance.
To me, the military problems of the situation are of more
interest than the political
ones, because by disposition I have
always been especially fond of war. No, I mean fond
of discussing
war; and fond of giving military advice. If I had
been with Jameson the morning
after he started, I should have
advised him to turn back. That was Monday; it was then
that
he received his first warning from a Boer source not to violate
the friendly
soil of the Transvaal. It showed that his invasion
was known. If I had been with him on
Tuesday morning and
afternoon, when he received further warnings, I should have
repeated my advice. If I had been with him the next morning—New
Year's—when he received notice that "a few
hundred" Boers were waiting
for him a few miles ahead, I
should not have advised, but commanded him to go back.
And if I had been with him two or three hours later—a thing
not
conceivable to me—I should have retired him by force;
for at that time he
learned that the few hundred had now
grown to 800; and that meant that the growing would
go on
growing.
For, by authority of Mr. Garrett, one knows that Jameson's
600 were only 530 at most, when you count out his native
drivers, etc.; and that
the 530 consisted largely of "green"
youths, "raw young fellows," not trained and
war-worn British
soldiers; and I would have told Jameson that those lads
would not be able to shoot
effectively from horseback in the
scamper and racket of battle, and that there would not
be anything
for them to shoot at, anyway, but rocks; for the Boers
would be behind the rocks,
not out in the open. I would have
told him that 300 Boer sharpshooters behind rocks
would be
an overmatch for his 500 raw young fellows on horseback.
BOERS RECEIVING ARMS AND EQUIPMENTS.
If pluck were the only thing essential to battle-winning, the
English would lose no
battles. But discretion, as well as pluck,
is required when one fights Boers and Red
Indians. In South
Africa the Briton has always insisted upon standing bravely
up,
unsheltered, before the hidden Boer, and taking the results.
Jameson's men would follow
the custom. Jameson would not
have listened to me—he would have been intent upon repeating
history, according to precedent. Americans are not acquainted
with the British-Boer war of 1881; but its history is
interesting, and could have been instructive to Jameson if he
had been receptive. I will cull some details of it from trustworthy
sources—mainly from "Russell's Natal." Mr. Russell
is not a Boer, but a Briton. He is inspector of schools, and his
history is a text-book whose purpose is the instruction of the
Natal English youth.
After the seizure of the Transvaal and the suppression of
the Boer government by
England in 1877, the Boers fretted for
three years, and made several appeals to England
for a restoration
of their liberties, but without result. Then they gathered
themselves together in
a great mass-meeting at Krugersdorp,
talked their troubles over, and resolved to fight
for their deliverance
from the British yoke. (Krugersdorp—the place where
the Boers
interrupted the Jameson raid.) The little handful of
farmers rose against the
strongest empire in the world. They
proclaimed martial law and the re-establishment of
their Republic.
They organized their forces and sent them
forward to
intercept the British battalions. This, although Sir Garnet
Wolseley
had but lately made proclamation that "so long as
the sun shone in the heavens," the
Transvaal would be and
remain English territory. And also in spite of the fact that
the commander of the 94th regiment—already on the march
to suppress
this rebellion—had been heard to say that "the
Boers would turn tail at the
first beat of the big drum."*
"South Africa As It Is," by F. Reginald Statham, page 82. London: T. Fisher
Unwin,
1897.
Four days after the flag-raising, the Boer force which had
been sent forward to forbid
the invasion of the English troops
met them at Bronkhorst Spruit—246 men of
the 94th regiment,
in command of a colonel, the big drum
beating, the band
playing—and the first battle was fought. It lasted ten minutes.
Result:
British loss, more than 150 officers and men, out of the 246.
Surrender of the remnant.
Boer loss—if any—not stated.
They are fine marksmen, the Boers. From the cradle up,
they live on horseback and hunt
wild animals with the rifle.
They have a passion for liberty and the Bible, and care for
nothing else.
"General Sir George Colley, Lieutenant-Governor and
Commander-in-Chief in Natal, felt
it his duty to proceed at
once to the relief of the loyalists and soldiers beleaguered
in
the different towns of the Transvaal." He moved out with
1,000 men and some
artillery. He found the Boers encamped
in a strong and sheltered position on high ground
at Laing's
Nek—every Boer behind a rock. Early in the morning of
the
28th January, 1881, he moved to the attack "with the
58th regiment, commanded by Colonel
Deane, a mounted
squadron of 70 men, the 60th Rifles, the Naval Brigade with
three
rocket tubes, and the Artillery with six guns." He
shelled the Boers for twenty minutes,
then the assault was delivered,
the 58th marching up the
slope in solid column. The
battle was soon finished, with this
result, according to Russell:
British loss in killed and wounded, 174.
Boer loss, "trifling."
Colonel Deane was killed, and apparently every officer above
the grade of lieutenant
was killed or wounded, for the 58th
retreated to its camp in command
of a lieutenant. ("Africa as
It Is.")
That ended the second battle.
On the 7th of February General Colley discovered that the
Boers were flanking his
position. The next morning he left
his camp at Mount Pleasant and marched out and
crossed the
Ingogo river with 270 men, started up the Ingogo heights, and
there fought a battle which lasted from noon till nightfall. He
then retreated, leaving his wounded with his military chaplain,
and in recrossing the now swollen river lost some of his
men by drowning. That was the third Boer victory. Result,
according to Mr. Russell:
British loss 150 out of 270 engaged.
Boer loss, 8 killed, 9 wounded—17.
There was a season of quiet, now, but at the end of about
three weeks Sir George
Colley conceived the idea of climbing,
with an infantry and artillery force, the steep
and rugged
mountain of Amajuba in the night—a bitter hard task, but he
accomplished it. On the way he left about 200 men to guard
a strategic point, and took
about 400 up the mountain with
him. When the sun rose in the morning, there was an unpleasant
surprise for the Boers; yonder were the English
troops visible on top of the
mountain two or three miles away,
and now their own position was at the mercy of the
English
artillery. The Boer chief resolved to retreat—up that mountain.
He asked for volunteers, and got them.
The storming party crossed the swale and began to creep
up the steeps, "and from
behind rocks and bushes they shot at
the soldiers on the sky-line as if they were
stalking deer," says
Mr. Russell. There was "continuous musketry fire, steady
and
fatal on the one side, wild and ineffectual on the other."
The Boers reached the top,
and began to put in their ruinous
work. Presently the British "broke and fled for their
lives
down the rugged steep." The Boers had won the battle.
Result in killed and
wounded, including among the killed the
British General:
British loss, 226, out of 400 engaged.
Boer loss, I killed, 5 wounded.
That ended the war. England listened to reason, and
recognized the Boer
Republic—a government which has
never been in any really awful danger since,
until Jameson
started after it with his 500 "raw young fellows." To recapitulate:
The Boer farmers and British soldiers fought 4 battles, and
the Boers won them all.
Result of the 4, in killed and wounded:
British loss, 700 men.
Boer loss, so far as known, 23 men.
It is interesting, now, to note how loyally Jameson and his
several trained British
military officers tried to make their battles
conform to precedent. Mr. Garrett's account of the Raid
is much the best one I
have met with, and my impressions of
the Raid are drawn from that.
When Jameson learned that near Krugersdorp he would
find 800 Boers waiting to dispute
his passage, he was not in the
least disturbed. He was feeling as he had felt two or
three
days before, when he had opened his campaign with a historic
remark to the
same purport as the one with which the commander
of the 94th had opened the Boer-British war of fourteen
years before. That
Commander's remark was, that the Boers
"would turn tail at the first beat of the big
drum." Jameson's
was, that with his "raw young fellows" he could kick the
(persons) of the Boers "all round the Transvaal." He was
keeping close
to historic precedent.
Jameson arrived in the presence of the Boers. They—
according to
precedent—were not visible. It was a country
of ridges, depressions, rocks,
ditches, moraines of mining-tailings—not
even as favorable for cavalry work as Laing's Nek
had been in the former
disastrous days. Jameson shot at the
ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as
General Colley had
done at the Nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no
Boer
to show himself. Then about a hundred of his men
AFTER THE FIGHTING.
formed up to charge the ridge—according to the 58th's precedent
at the Nek; but as they dashed forward they opened
out in a long line, which was a considerable improvement on
the 58th's tacties; when they had gotten to within 200 yards
of the ridge the concealed Boers opened out on them and
emptied 20 saddles. The unwounded dismounted and fired at
the rocks over the backs of their horses; but the return-fire
was too hot, and they mounted again, "and galloped back or
crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where they were
shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds.
Some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night
which followed the Boers carried away another thirty
killed and wounded—the wounded to Krugersdorp hospital."
Sixty per cent. of the assaulted force disposed of—according
to Mr. Garrett's estimate.
It was according to Amajuba precedent, where the British
loss was 226 out of about 400
engaged.
Also, in Jameson's camp, that night, "there lay about 30
wounded or otherwise
disabled" men. Also during the night
"some 30 or 40 young fellows got separated from the
command
and straggled through into Johannesburg." Altogether
a possible 150 men gone, out
of his 530. His lads had fought
valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to
a Boer
to kick him around the Transvaal.
At dawn the next morning the column of something short
of 400 whites resumed its
march. Jameson's grit was stubbornly
good; indeed, it was always that. He still had hopes.
There was a long and tedious
zigzagging march through
broken ground, with constant harassment from the Boers;
and at last the column "walked into a sort of trap," and the
Boers "closed in upon it."
"Men and horses dropped on all
sides. In the column the feeling grew that unless it
could
burst through the Boer lines at this point it was done for.
The Maxims were fired until they grew too hot, and, water
failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went out
of action. The 7-pounder was fired until only half an hour's
ammunition was left to fire with. One last rush was made,
and failed, and then the Staats Artillery came up on the left
flank, and the game was up."
Jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered.
There is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant
Boer farmer there who
thought that this white flag was the
national flag of England. He had been at
Bronkhorst, and
Laing's Nek, and Ingogo and Amajuba, and supposed that the
English
did not run up their flag excepting at the end of a fight.
PRISONERS AT ROLL CALL.
The following is (as I understand it) Mr. Garrett's estimate
of
Jameson's total loss in killed and wounded for the two days:
"When they gave in they were minus some 20 per cent. of
combatants. There were 76
casualties. There were 30 men
hurt or sick in the wagons. There were 27 killed on the
spot
or mortally wounded."
Total, 133, out of the original 530. It is just 25 per cent.*
However, I judge that the total was really 150; for the number of wounded
carried to
Krugersdorp hospital was 53; not 30, as Mr. Garrett reports it. The lady
whose guest I
was in Krugerdorp gave me the figures. She was head nurse from the
beginning of
hostilities (Jan. 1) until the professional nurses arrived, Jan. 8th. Of
the 53, "Three or four were Boers"; I quote her words.
Bronkhorst, Laing's Nek, Ingogo, and Amajuba, and seems to
indicate that Boer marksmanship is not so good now as it was
in those days. But there is one detail in which the Raid-episode
exactly repeats history. By surrender at Bronkhorst,
the whole British force disappeared from the theater of war;
this was the case with Jameson's force.
In the Boer loss, also, historical precedent is followed with
sufficient fidelity. In
the 4 battles named above, the Boer
loss, so far as known, was an average of 6 men per
battle, to
the British average loss of 175. In Jameson's battles, as per
Boer
official report, the Boer loss in killed was 4. Two of
these were killed by the Boers
themselves, by accident, the
other by Jameson's army—one of them
intentionally, the
other by a pathetic mischance. "A young Boer named Jacobz
was
moving forward to give a drink to one of the wounded
troopers
(Jameson's) after the first charge, when another
wounded man,
mistaking his intention, shot him." There
were three or four wounded Boers in the
Krugersdorp hospital,
and apparently no others have been reported. Mr. Garrett,
"on a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version,
and thanks Heaven
the killed was not larger."
As a military man, I wish to point out what seems to me
to be military errors in the
conduct of the campaign which we
have just been considering. I have seen active service
in the
field, and it was in the actualities of war that I acquired my
training and
my right to speak. I served two weeks in the
beginning of our Civil War, and during all
that time commanded
a battery of infantry composed of twelve men.
General Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it
him. I also told him the principle upon which I had conducted
it; which was, to tire the enemy. I tired out and disqualified
many battalions, yet never had a casualty myself nor
lost a man. General Grant was not given to paying compliments,
yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole
war much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what
the army might have lost through the inspiriting results of
collision in the field would have been amply made up by the
liberalizing influences of travel. Further endorsement does
not seem to me to be necessary.
Let us now examine history, and see what it teaches. In
the 4 battles fought in 1881
and the two fought by Jameson,
the British loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners, was
substantially
1,300 men; the Boer loss, as far as is ascertainable, was
about 30 men. These
figures show that there was a defect
somewhere. It was not in the absence of courage. I
think it
lay in the absence of discretion. The Briton should have done
one thing
or the other: discarded British methods and fought
the Boer with Boer methods, or
augmented his own force until
—using British methods—it should be
large enough to equalize
results with the Boer.
To retain the British method requires certain things, determinable
by arithmetic. If, for argument's sake, we allow that
the aggregate of 1,716
British soldiers engaged in the 4 early
battles was opposed by the same aggregate of
Boers, we have
this result: the British loss of 700 and the Boer loss of 23
argues
that in order to equalize results in future battles you
must make the British force
thirty times as strong as the Boer
force. Mr. Garrett shows that the Boer force
immediately opposed
to Jameson was 2,000, and that there were 6,000 more
on hand by the evening of the
second day. Arithmetic shows
TIRING THE ENEMY.
that in order to make himself the equal of the 8,000 Boers,
Jameson should have had 240,000 men, whereas he merely had
530 boys. From a military point of view, backed by the facts
of history, I conceive that Jameson's military judgment was at
fault.
Another thing. Jameson was encumbered by artillery,
ammunition, and rifles. The facts
of the battle show that he
should have had none of those things along. They were heavy,
they were in his way, they impeded his march. There was
nothing to shoot at but
rocks—he knew quite well that there
would be nothing to shoot at but
rocks—and he knew that
artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks. He was
badly
overloaded with unessentials. He had 8 Maxims—a Maxim
is a kind
of Gatling, I believe, and shoots about 500 bullets
per minute; he had one
12½-pounder cannon and two 7-pounders;
also,
145,000 rounds of ammunition. He worked the
Maxims so hard upon the rocks that five of
them became disabled—five
of the Maxims, not the rocks. It is believed that
upwards of 100,000 rounds of
ammunition of the various kinds
were fired during the 21 hours that the battles lasted.
One
man killed. He must have been much mutilated. It was a
pity to bring those futile Maxims along. Jameson should have
furnished himself with a
battery of pudd'nhead Wilson maxims
instead. They are much more deadly than those others,
and they are easily carried,
because they have no weight.
Mr. Garrett—not very carefully concealing a smile—excuses
the presence of the Maxims by saying that they were of
very substantial use
because their sputtering disordered the
aim of the Boers, and in that way saved lives.
Three cannon, eight Maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded
a result which emphasized
a fact which had already been established—that
the British system of standing out in the open to
fight Boers who are behind rocks
is not wise, not excusable,
and ought to be abandoned for something more efficacious.
For the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste ammunition.
THE DOCUMENT IN EVIDENCE.
If I could get the management of one of those campaigns,
I would know what to do, for
I have studied the Boer. He
values the Bible above every other thing. The most delicious
edible in South Africa is "biltong." You will have seen it
mentioned in Olive
Schreiner's books. It is what our plainsmen
call "jerked beef." It is the Boer's main standby. He
has a passion for it, and he is right.
If I had the command of the campaign I would go with
rifles only, no cumbersome Maxims
and cannon to spoil good
rocks with. I would move surreptitiously by night to a point
about a quarter of a mile from the Boer camp, and there I
would build up a pyramid
of biltong and Bibles fifty feet high,
and then conceal my men all about. In the morning
the
Boers would send out spies, and then the rest would come with
a rush. I would
surround them, and they would have to fight
my men on equal terms, in the open. There
wouldn't be any
Amajuba results.*
Just as I am finishing this book an unfortunate dispute has sprung up between
Dr.
Jameson and his officers, on the one hand, and Colonel Rhodes on the other,
concerning
the wording of a note which Colonel Rhodes sent from Johannesburg by
a cyclist to
Jameson just before hostilities began on the memorable New Year's Day.
Some of the
fragments of this note were found on the battlefield after the fight, and
these have
been pieced together; the dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments
contained. Jameson says the note promised him a reinforcement of 300 men
from
Johannesburg. Colonel Rhodes denies this, and says he merely promised to
send out
"some" men "to meet you."
It seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so
little a thing. If the
300 had been sent, what good would it have done? In 21 hours of
industrious fighting,
Jameson's 530 men, with 8 Maxims, 3
cannon, and 145,000 rounds of ammunition,
killed an aggregate of 1 Boer. These
statistics show that a reinforcement of 300
Johannesburgers, armed merely with
muskets, would have killed, at the outside,
only a little over a half of another Boer.
This would not have saved the day. It
would not even have seriously affected the
general result. The figures show clearly,
and with mathematical violence, that the
only way to save Jameson, or even give
him a fair and equal chance with the enemy, was
for Johannesburg to send him 240
Maxims, 90 cannon, 600 carloads of ammunition, and
240,000 men. Johannesburg
was not in a position to do this. Johannesburg has been
called very hard names for
not reinforcing Jameson. But in every instance this has
been done by two classes of
persons—people who do not read history, and
people, like Jameson, who do not
understand what it means, after they have read
it.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness;
but
we can try.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Duke of Fife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes
deceived him. That is also what Mr. Rhodes did with
the Reformers. He got them into
trouble, and then
stayed out himself. A judicious man. He has always been
that. As
to this there was a moment of doubt, once. It was
when he was out on his last pirating
expedition in the Matabele
country. The cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed,
to visit a party of hostile chiefs. It was true, too; and
this dare-devil thing
came near fetching another indiscretion
out of the poet laureate. It would have been too
bad, for when
the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady along,
too, and she also was unarmed.
In the opinion of many people Mr. Rhodes is South Africa;
others think he is only a
large part of it. These latter consider
that South Africa consists of Table Mountain,
the diamond
mines, the Johannesburg gold fields, and Cecil Rhodes. The
gold fields
are wonderful in every way. In seven or eight
years they built up, in a desert, a city
of a hundred thousand
inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the
ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out
of lasting material.
Nowhere in the world is there such a concentration
of rich mines as at Johannesburg. Mr. Bonamici,
my manager there, gave me a small
gold brick with some statistics
engraved upon it which record the output of gold from
the early days to July,
1895, and exhibit the strides which have
been made in the development of the industry; in 1888 the
output was $4,162,440; the output of the next five and a half
years was (total) $17,585,894; for the single year ending with
June, 1895, it was $45,553,700.
The capital which has developed the mines came from England,
the mining engineers from America. This is the case
with the diamond mines also.
South Africa seems to be the
heaven of the American scientific mining engineer. He gets
the choicest places, and keeps them. His salary is not based
upon what he would
get in America, but apparently upon what
a whole family of him would get there.
The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is
not rich, from a Californian
point of view. Rock which yields
ten or twelve dollars a ton is considered plenty rich
enough.
It is troubled with base metals to such a degree that twenty
years ago it
would have been only about half as valuable as
it is now; for at that time there was no
paying way of getting
anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained "free" gold;
but the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold
fields of the world
now deliver up fifty million dollars' worth
of gold per year which would have gone into
the tailing-pile
under the former conditions.
The cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest;
and among the costly and
elaborate mining machinery there
were fine things which were new to me, but I was
already familiar
with the rest of the details of the gold-mining industry.
I had been a gold miner
myself, in my day, and knew substantially
everything that those people knew about it, except how
to make money at it. But I
learned a good deal about the
Boers there, and that was a fresh subject. What I heard
there
was afterwards repeated to me in other parts of South Africa.
Summed
up—according to the information thus gained—this
is the Boer:
He is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate,
bigoted, uncleanly in
his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings
with the whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy,
a good shot, good
horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of
political independence, a good husband and
father, not fond of
herding together in towns, but liking the seclusion and remoteness
and solitude and empty vastness and silence of the veldt;
a man of a mighty
appetite, and not delicate about what he
appeases it with—well-satisfied with
pork and Indian corn
and biltong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be
stinted; willing to ride a long journey to take a hand in a
rude all-night dance
interspersed with vigorous feeding and
boisterous jollity, but ready to ride twice as
far for a prayer-meeting;
proud of his Dutch and
Huguenot origin and its
religious and military history; proud of his race's achievements
in South Africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted
deserts in search of free solitudes unvexed by the
pestering and detested English,
also its victories over the
natives and the British; proudest of all, of the direct and
effusive
personal interest which the Deity has always taken in its
affairs. He cannot read,
he cannot write; he has one or two
newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it;
until latterly
he had no schools, and taught his children nothing; news
is a term which has no
meaning to him, and the thing itself he
cares nothing about. He hates to be taxed and
resents it.
He has stood stock still in South Africa for two centuries and
a half,
and would like to stand still till the end of time, for he
has no sympathy with
Uitlander notions of progress. He is
hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his
preference has
been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses
and
gold and diamonds. The gold and the diamonds have
brought the godless stranger within
his gates, also contamination
and broken repose, and he wishes that they had never
been discovered.
I think that the bulk of those details can be found in
Olive Schreiner's books, and
she would not be accused of
sketching the Boer's portrait with an unfair hand.
Now what would you expect from that unpromising material?
What ought you to expect from it? Laws inimical to
religious liberty? Yes. Laws denying
representation and
suffrage to the intruder? Yes. Laws unfriendly to educational
institutions? Yes. Laws obstructive of gold production?
Yes. Discouragement of
railway expansion? Yes. Laws
heavily taxing the intruder and overlooking the Boer? Yes.
The Uitlander seems to have expected something very
different from all that. I do not
know why. Nothing different
from it was rationally to be expected. A round man
cannot be expected to fit a
square hole right away. He must
have time to modify his shape. The modification had
begun
in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some
progress. It has
made further progress since. There are
wise men in the Boer government, and that
accounts for the
modification; the modification of the Boer mass has probably
not
begun yet. If the heads of the Boer government had not
been wise men they would have
hanged Jameson, and thus
turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr. But
even their wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr.
Rhodes if they ever catch him.
That will round him and
complete him and make him a saint. He has already been
called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur, and
he ought to rise to this
one, the grandest of all. It will be a
dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is
nothing, it will
land him in good company and be a pleasant change for him.
Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers'
Manifesto have been conceded since the days of the Raid, and
the others will follow in time, no doubt. It was most fortunate
for the miners of Johannesburg that the taxes which distressed
them so much were levied by the Boer government, instead of
by their friend Rhodes and his Chartered Company of highwaymen,
for these latter take half of whatever their mining
victims find, they do not stop at a mere percentage. If the
Johannesburg miners were under their jurisdiction they would
be in the poorhouse in twelve-months.
I have been under the impression all along that I had an
unpleasant paragraph about
the Boers somewhere in my notebook,
and also a pleasant
one. I have found them now. The
unpleasant one is dated at an interior village, and
says:
"Mr. Z. called. He is an English Afrikander; is an old resident, and has
a Boer wife.
He speaks the language, and his professional business is with
the Boers exclusively. He
told me that the ancient Boer families in the great
region of which this village is the
commercial center are falling victims to
their inherited indolence and dullness in the
materialistic latter-day race and
struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip
of the usurer—getting
hopelessly in debt—and are losing their
high place and retiring to second and
lower. The Boer's farm does not go to another
Boer when he loses it, but to
a foreigner. Some have fallen so low that they sell their
daughters to the
blacks."
Under date of another South African town I find the note
which is creditable to the
Boers:
"Dr. X. told me that in the Kafir war 1,500 Kafirs took refuge in a great
cave in the
mountains about 90 miles north of Johannesburg, and the Boers
blocked up the entrance
and smoked them to death. Dr. X. has been in there
and seen the great array of bleached
skeletons—one a woman with the skeleton
of a child hugged to her breast."
The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man
wants their lands, and all must
go excepting such percentage
of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms
to
be determined by himself. Since history has removed the
element of guesswork
from this matter and made it certainty,
the humanest way of diminishing the black
population should
be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes
and his gang have been following the old ways. They are
chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a
compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas
and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the
hallowed old style of "purchase" for a song, and then they
force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They
rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the
cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have
tricked and assassinated. They issue "regulations" requiring
the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers,
and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery,
and is several times worse than was the American slavery
which used to pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian
slave is sick, superannuated, or otherwise disabled, he must
support himself or starve—his master is under no obligation
to support him.
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to
the desired limit is a return
to the old-time slow-misery and
lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude
"civilization."
We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs
by swift
chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks
by swift
suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian
pioneer humanely reduced his
overplus of aboriginal neighbors
by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned
pudding.
All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I
would rather
suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in
thirty successive days than linger
out one of the Rhodesian
twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation,
and forced labor for a man whose entire race
the victim
hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and
pillage,
and puts the right stain upon it.
Several long journeys gave us experience of the Cape
Colony railways; easy-riding,
fine cars; all the conveniences;
thorough cleanliness; comfortable beds furnished for the night
trains. It was in the first days of June, and winter; the daytime
was pleasant, the nighttime nice and cold. Spinning
along all day in the cars it was ecstasy to breathe the bracing
air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet
plains, soft and lovely near by, still softer and lovelier further
away, softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances,
where dim island-hills seemed afloat, as in a sea—a sea made
of dream-stuff and flushed with colors faint and rich; and
dear me, the depth of the sky, and the beauty of the strange
new cloud-forms, and the glory of the sunshine, the lavishness,
the wastefulness of it! The vigor and freshness and inspiration
of the air and the sun—well, it was all just as Olive
Schreiner had made it in her books.
To me the veldt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly
beautiful. There were
unlevel stretches where it was rolling
and swelling, and rising and subsiding, and
sweeping superbly
on and on, and still on and on like an ocean, toward the faraway
horizon, its pale brown deepening by delicately graduated
shades to rich orange, and finally to purple and crimson
where it washed against
the wooded hills and naked red crags
at the base of the sky.
Everywhere, from Cape Town to Kimberley, and from
Kimberley to Port Elizabeth and East
London, the towns were
well populated with tamed blacks; tamed and Christianized too,
I suppose, for they wore the dowdy clothes of our Christian
civilization. But for
that, many of them would have been remarkably
handsome. These fiendish clothes, together with
the proper lounging gait,
good-natured face, happy air, and
easy laugh, made them precise counterparts of our
American
blacks; often where all the other aspects were strikingly and
harmoniously and thrillingly African, a flock of these natives
would intrude, looking
wholly out of place, and spoil it all,
making the thing a grating discord, half African and half
American.
OLD ACQUAINTANCES.
One Sunday in King William's Town a score of colored
women came mincing across the
great barren square dressed
—oh, in the last perfection of fashion, and
newness, and expensiveness,
and showy mixture of
unrelated colors,—all just
as I had seen it so
often at home; and
in their faces and
their gait was that
languishing, aristocratic,
divine delight
in their finery which
was so familiar
to me,
and had always been
such a satisfaction to
my eye and my heart.
I seemed among old,
old friends; friends
of fifty years, and I
stopped and
cordially
greeted them. They
broke into a good-fellowship
laugh, flashing
their white teeth
upon me, and all
answered at once. I
did not
understand a word they said. I was astonished; I
was not dreaming that they would answer
in anything
but American.
The voices, too, of the African women, were familiar to me
—sweet and
musical, just like those of the slave women of my
early days. I followed a couple of
them all over the Orange
Free State—no, over its capital—Bloemfontein, to hear their
liquid voices and the happy ripple of their laughter. Their
language was a large improvement upon American. Also upon
the Zulu. It had no Zulu clicks in it; and it seemed to have
no angles or corners, no roughness, no vile s's or other hissing
sounds, but was very, very mellow and rounded and flowing.
In moving about the country in the trains, I had opportunity
to see a good many Boers of the veldt. One day at a village
station a hundred of
them got out of the third-class cars to feed.
Their clothes were
very interesting.
For
ugliness of shapes, and
for miracles of ugly
colors inharmoniously
associated, they were
a record.
HE SAID "NO" RUDELY.
The effect was
nearly as exciting
and interesting as that
produced by the
brilliant
and beautiful
clothes and perfect
taste always on view
at the Indian
railway
stations. One man
had corduroy trousers
of a faded chewing-gum
tint. And they
were new—showing
that this tint did not come by
calamity, but was intentional;
the very ugliest color I have ever seen. A gaunt, shackly
country lout six feet high, in battered gray slouched hat with
wide brim, and old
resin-colored breeches, had on a hideous
HE FELT STUFFY.
brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger skin—
wavy broad stripes of dazzling yellow and deep brown. I
thought he ought to be hanged, and asked the stationmaster
if it could be arranged. He said no; and not only
that, but said it rudely; said it with a quite unnecessary
show of feeling. Then he muttered something about my being
a jackass, and walked away and pointed me out to people, and
did everything he could to turn public sentiment against me.
It is what one gets for trying to do good.
In the train that day a passenger told me some more about
Boer life out in the lonely
veldt. He said the Boer gets up
early and sets his "niggers" at their tasks
(pasturing the cattle,
and watching them);eats, smokes, drowses,
sleeps; toward
evening superintends the milking, etc.; eats, smokes, drowses;
goes
to bed at early candlelight in the fragrant clothes he
(and she) have
worn all day and every week-day for years. I
remember that last detail, in Olive
Schreiner's "Story of an
African Farm." And the passenger told me that the Boers
were justly noted for their hospitality. He told me a story
about it. He said that his
grace the Bishop of a certain See
was once making a business-progress through the
tavernless
veldt, and one night he stopped with a Boer; after supper was
shown to
bed; he undressed, weary and worn out, and was
soon sound asleep; in the night he woke
up feeling crowded
and suffocated, and found the old Boer and his fat wife in bed
with him, one on each side, with all their clothes on, and snoring.
He had to stay there and stand it—awake and suffering
—until toward dawn, when sleep again fell upon him for an
hour. Then he woke
again. The Boer was gone, but the wife
was still at his side.
Those Reformers detested that Boer prison; they were not
used to cramped quarters and
tedious hours, and weary idleness,
and early to bed, and
limited movement, and arbitrary
and irritating rules, and the absence of the luxuries which
wealth comforts the day and the night with. The confinement
told upon their bodies and their spirits; still, they were
superior men, and they made the best that was to be made
of the circumstances. Their wives smuggled delicacies to them,
which helped to smooth the way down for the prison fare.
In the train Mr. B. told me that the Boer jail-guards
treated the black
prisoners—even political ones—mercilessly.
An African chief and
his following had been kept there nine
months without trial, and during all that time
they had been
without shelter from rain and sun. He said that one day the
guards
put a big black in the stocks for dashing his soup on
the ground; they stretched his
legs painfully wide apart, and
set him with his back down hill; he could not endure it,
and
put back his hands upon the slope for a support. The guard
ordered him to
withdraw the support—and kicked him in the
back. "Then," said Mr. B., "the
powerful black wrenched
the stocks asunder and went for the guard; a Reform prisoner
pulled him off, and thrashed the guard himself."
CHAPTER LXIX.
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if
it
had had its rights.
—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
to Mr. Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion
of nature in South Africa was the diamond-crater.
The Rand gold fields are a stupendous
marvel, and they make all other gold fields
small, but I was
not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to
see, but it was only another and lovelier variety of our Great
Plains; the natives were
very far from being uninteresting,
but they were not new; and as for the towns, I could
find my
way without a guide through the most of them because I had
learned the
streets, under other names, in towns just like them
in other lands; but the diamond mine
was a wholly fresh
thing, a splendid and absorbing novelty. Very few people in
the
world have seen the diamond in its home. It has but
three or four homes in the world,
whereas gold has a million.
It is worth while to journey around the globe to see
anything
which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the diamond
mine is the
greatest and most select and restricted novelty
which the globe has in stock.
The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about
1869, I think. When everything is
taken into consideration,
the wonder is that they were not discovered five thousand
years ago and made familiar to the African world for the rest
of time. For this
reason the first diamonds were found on the
surface of the ground. They were smooth and
limpid, and in
the sunlight they vomited fire. They were the very things
which an African savage of any era would value above every
other thing in the world excepting a glass bead. For two or
three centuries we have been buying his lands, his cattle, his
neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale, for glass beads:
and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the diamonds
—for he must have picked them up many and many a time.
It would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of
course, since the whites already had plenty of glass beads, and
more fashionably shaped, too, than these; but one would think
that the poorer sort of black, who could not afford real glass,
would have been humbly content to decorate himself with the
imitation, and that presently the white trader would notice the
things, and dimly suspect, and carry some of them home, and
find out what they were, and at once empty a multitude of
fortune-hunters into Africa. There are many strange things in
human history; one of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds
laid there so long without exciting any one's interest.
The revelation came at last by accident. In a Boer's hut
out in the wide solitude of
the plains, a traveling stranger
noticed a child playing with a bright object, and was
told it
was a piece of glass which had been found in the veldt. The
stranger
bought it for a trifle and carried it away; and being
without honor, made another
stranger believe it was a diamond,
and so got $125 out of him for it, and was as pleased
with himself
as if he had done a righteous thing. In Paris the wronged
stranger sold it to a
pawnshop for $10,000, who sold it to a
countess for $90,000, who sold it to a brewer for
$800,000, who
traded it to a king for a dukedom and a pedigree, and the king
"put
it up the spout."†
From the Greek
meaning "pawned it."
The news flew around, and the South African diamond-boom
began. The original traveler—the dishonest one—now
remembered that he had once seen a Boer teamster chocking
his wagon-wheel on a steep
grade with a diamond as large as
a football, and he laid aside his occupations and
started out to
hunt for it, but not with the intention of cheating anybody out
of
$125 with it, for he had reformed.
We now come to matters more didactic. Diamonds are
not imbedded in rock ledges fifty
miles long, like the Johannesburg
gold, but are distributed through the rubbish of a filled-up
well, so to speak. The well is rich, its walls are sharply
defined; outside of the
walls are no diamonds. The well is a
crater, and a large one. Before it had been meddled
with, its
surface was even with the level plain, and there was no sign to
suggest
that it was there. The pasturage covering the surface
of the Kimberley crater was
sufficient for the support of a cow,
and the pasturage underneath was sufficient for the
support of
a kingdom; but the cow did not know it, and lost her chance.
The Kimberley crater is roomy enough to admit the Roman
Coliseum; the bottom of the
crater has not been reached, and
no one can tell how far down in the bowels of the earth
it
goes. Originally, it was a perpendicular hole packed solidly
full of blue rock
or cement, and scattered through that blue
mass, like raisins in a pudding, were the
diamonds. As deep
down in the earth as the blue stuff extends, so deep will the
diamonds be found.
There are three or four other celebrated craters near by—
a circle three
miles in diameter would enclose them all. They
are owned by the De Beers Company, a
consolidation of diamond
properties arranged by Mr. Rhodes twelve or fourteen
years ago. The De Beers owns
other craters; they are under
the grass, but the De Beers knows where they are, and will
open them some day, if the market should require it.
Originally, the diamond deposits were the property of the
Orange Free State; but a
judicious "rectification" of the
boundary line shifted them over into the British
territory of
Cape Colony. A high official of the Free State told me that
the sum
of $400,000 was handed to his commonwealth as a
compromise, or indemnity, or something
of the sort, and that
he thought his commonwealth did wisely to take the money
and
keep out of a dispute, since the power was all on the one
side and the weakness all on
the other. The De Beers Company
dig out $400,000 worth of diamonds per week, now. The
Cape got the territory, but
no profit; for Mr. Rhodes and the
Rothschilds and the other De Beers people own the
mines, and
they pay no taxes.
SEARCHING FOR GEMS.
In our day the mines are worked upon scientific principles, under
the guidance of the ablest
mining-engineering talent
procurable in America.
There
are elaborate works for reducing
the blue rock and
passing it through one process
after another until every
diamond it contains has been
hunted down and
secured. I
watched the "concentrators"
at work—big tanks containing
mud and water and invisible
diamonds—and was
told that each could stir and
churn and properly
treat 300
car-loads of mud per day—
1,600 pounds to the car-load
—and reduce it to 3 car-loads of slush. I saw the 3 carloads
of slush taken to the "pulsators" and there reduced to a
quarter of a load of nice clean dark-colored sand. Then I followed
it to the sorting tables and saw the men deftly and swiftly
spread it out and brush it about and seize the diamonds as they
showed up. I assisted, and once I found a diamond half as large
as an almond. It is an exciting kind of fishing, and you feel a
fine thrill of pleasure every time you detect the glow of one of
those limpid pebbles through the veil of dark sand. I would
like to spend my Saturday holidays in that charming sport
every now and then. Of course there are disappointments.
Sometimes you find a diamond which is not a diamond; it is
only a quartz crystal or some such worthless thing. The expert
can generally distinguish it from the precious stone which
it is counterfeiting; but if he is in doubt he lays it on a flatiron
and hits it with a sledge-hammer. If it is a diamond it holds
its own; if it is anything else, it is reduced to powder. I liked
that experiment very much, and did not tire of repetitions of
it. It was full of enjoyable apprehensions, unmarred by any
personal sense of risk. The De Beers concern treats 8,000 carloads—about
6,000 tons—of blue rock per day, and the result
is three pounds of diamonds. Value, uncut, $50,000 to $70,000.
After cutting, they will weigh considerably less than a pound,
but will be worth four or five times as much as they were before.
All the plain around that region is spread over, a foot deep,
with blue rock, placed
there by the Company, and looks like
a plowed field. Exposure for a length of time make
the rock
easier to work than it is when it comes out of the mine. If
mining should
cease now, the supply of rock spread over those
fields would furnish the usual 8,000
car-loads per day to the
separating works during three years. The fields are fenced
and watched; and at night they are under the constant inspection
of lofty electric searchlight. They contain fifty or sixty
million dollars' worth
of diamonds, and there is an abundance
of enterprising thieves around.
In the dirt of the Kimberley streets there is much hidden
wealth. Some time ago the
people were granted the privilege
of a free wash-up. There was a general rush, the work
was
done with thoroughness, and a good harvest of diamonds was
gathered.
INSIDE OF COMPOUND WITH NET COVERING TO PREVENT THOWING GEMS
OUT OF THE CRATER.
The deep mining is done by natives. There are many hundreds
of them. They live in quarters built around the inside
of a great compound. They
are a jolly and good-natured lot,
and accommodating. They performed a war-dance for us,
which was the wildest exhibition I have ever seen. They are
not allowed outside of
the compound during their term of service—three
months, I think it is, as a rule. They go down
the shaft, stand their watch, come
up again, are searched, and
go to bed or to their amusements in the compound; and this
routine they repeat, day in and day out.
It is thought that they do not now steal many diamonds—
successfully. They
used to swallow them, and find other ways
of concealing them, but the white man found
ways of beating
their various games. One man cut his leg and shoved a diamond
into the wound, but even that project did not succeed.
When they find a fine large diamond they are more likely to
report it than to steal it, for in the former case they get a reward,
and in the latter they are quite apt to merely get into
trouble. Some years ago, in a mine not owned by the De
Beers, a black found what has been claimed to be the largest
diamond known to the world's history; and as a reward he
was released from service and given a blanket, a horse, and
five hundred dollars.
It made him a Vanderbilt.
He could
buy four wives, and
have money left.
Four wives are an
ample support for a
native. With four
wives he is wholly
independent, and
need never do a
stroke of work again.
That great diamond
weighs 97
carats. Some say it
is as big as a piece of
alum, others say
it
is as large as a bite
of rock candy, but
the best authorities
agree
that it is almost
exactly the size of a chunk of ice. But those details are not
important; and in my opinion not trustworthy. It has a flaw
in it, otherwise it would be of incredible value. As it is, it is
held to be worth $2,000,000. After cutting it ought to be
worth from $5,000,000 to $8,000,000, therefore persons desiring
to save money should buy it now. It is owned by a syndicate,
and apparently there is no satisfactory market for it. It is
earning nothing; it is eating its head off. Up to this time it
has made nobody rich but the native who found it.
He found it in a mine which was being worked by contract.
That is to say, a company
had bought the privilege of taking
from the mine 5,000,000 carloads of blue-rock, for a
sum down
and a royalty. Their speculation had not paid; but on the
very day that
their privilege ran out that native found the
$2,000,000-diamond and handed it over to
them. Even the
diamond culture is not without its romantic episodes.
The Koh-i-Noor is a large diamond, and valuable; but it
cannot compete in these
matters with three which—according
to legend—are among the crown
trinkets of Portugal and
Russia. One of these is held to be worth $20,000,000; another,
$25,000,000, and the third something over $28,000,000.
Those are truly wonderful diamonds, whether they exist or
not; and yet they are of but
little importance by comparison
with the one wherewith the Boer wagoner chocked his
wheel
on that steep grade as heretofore referred to. In Kimberley I
had some
conversation with the man who saw the Boer do
that—an incident which had
occurred twenty-seven or twenty-eight
years before I had my talk with him. He assured me
that that diamond's value could
have been over a billion
dollars, but not under it. I believed him, because he had devoted
twenty-seven years to hunting for it, and was in a
position to know.
A fitting and interesting finish to an examination of the
tedious and laborious and
costly processes whereby the diamonds
are gotten out of the deeps of the earth and freed
from the
base stuffs which imprison them is the visit to the De Beers
offices in the town of Kimberley, where the result of each
day's mining is brought every day, and weighed, assorted,
valued, and deposited in safes against shipping-day. An unknown
and unaccredited person cannot get into that place;
and it seemed apparent from the generous supply of warning
and protective and prohibitory signs that were posted all about
that not even the known and
accredited can steal diamonds
there without inconvenience.
NATIVE MINERS GAMBLING.
We saw the day's output
—shining little nests of diamonds,
distributed a foot
apart, along a counter, each
nest
reposing upon a sheet of
white paper. That day's
catch was about $70,000
worth. In the course of a
year half a ton of diamonds
pass under the scales there
and sleep on that counter;
the resulting money is $18,000,000
or $20,000,000. Profit, about $12,000,000.
Young girls were doing the sorting—a nice, clean, dainty,
and probably
distressing employment. Every day ducal incomes
sift and sparkle through the fingers of those young
girls; yet they go to bed at
night as poor as they were when
they got up in the morning. The same thing next day, and
all
the days.
They are beautiful things, those diamonds, in their native
state. They are of various
shapes; they have flat surfaces,
rounded borders, and never a sharp edge. They are of
all
colors and shades of color, from dewdrop white to actual black;
and their smooth and rounded surfaces and contours, variety
of color, and transparent limpidity make them look like piles
of assorted candies. A very light straw color is their commonest
tint. It seemed to me that these uncut gems must be
more beautiful than any cut ones could be; but when a collection
of cut ones was brought out, I saw my mistake. Nothing
is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the light playing
through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like it—
wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking
a white-sand bottom.
Before the middle of July we reached Cape Town, and the
end of our African
journeyings. And well satisfied; for, towering
above us was Table Mountain—a reminder that we had
now seen each and
all of the great features of South Africa
except Mr. Cecil Rhodes. I realize that that
is a large exception.
I know quite well that whether Mr.
Rhodes is the lofty
and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe
him to be, or Satan come again, as the rest of the world account
him, he is still the
most imposing figure in the British empire
outside of England. When he stands on the
Cape of Good
Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi. He is the only colonial
in the
British dominions whose goings and comings are chronicled
and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose
speeches, unclipped, are
cabled from the ends of the earth;
and he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in
London
can compete for attention with an eclipse.
That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of
fortune, not even his dearest
South African enemies were
willing to deny, so far as I heard them testify. The whole
South African world seemed to stand in a kind of shuddering
awe of him, friend and
enemy alike. It was as if he were
deputy-God on the one side, deputy-Satan on the other,
proprietor
of the people, able to make them or ruin them by his
breath, worshiped by many, hated by many, but blasphemed
by none among the judicious, and even by the indiscreet in
guarded whispers only.
What is the secret of his formidable supremacy? One says
it is his prodigious wealth
—a wealth whose drippings in salaries
and in other ways support multitudes and make them
his interested and loyal
vassals; another says it is his personal
magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that
these hypnotize
and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of
their
influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast
schemes for the territorial
aggrandizement of England, his
patriotic and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent
protection
and her just rule over the pagan wastes of Africa and
make luminous the African
darkness with the glory of her
name; and another says he wants the earth and wants it
for
his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let his
friends in on the
ground floor is the secret that rivets so many
eyes upon him and
keeps him in the zenith where the view is
unobstructed.
One may take his choice. They are all the same price.
One fact is sure: he keeps his
prominence and a vast following,
no matter what he does. He "deceives" the Duke of
Fife—
it is the Duke's word—but that does not destroy the Duke's
loyalty to him. He tricks the Reformers into immense trouble
with his Raid, but
the most of them believe he meant well.
He weeps over the harshly-taxed Johannesburgers
and makes
them his friends; at the same time he taxes his Charter-settlers
50 per
cent., and so wins their affection and their confidence
that they are squelched with
despair at every rumor that the
Charter is to be annulled. He raids and robs and slays
and
enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian
applause for it. He
has beguiled England into buying Charter
waste paper for Bank of England notes, ton for
ton, and the
ravished still burn incense to him as the Eventual God of
Plenty. He has done everything he could think of to pull
himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough
to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he
stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of
the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the
mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world,
Satan with a tail to the other half.
I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time
comes I shall buy a piece of the
rope for a keepsake.