Up the Country

Wednesday, May 9.

We were at home yesterday evening. I went to see Miss R. in the morning, and she told me that the ladies at Simla had settled that they would not dance, because the Sikh envoys were asked, and they had no idea of dancing before natives. Considering that we ask forty natives to every dance we give at Calcutta, and that nobody ever cares, it was late to make any objection; and Miss R. said that she begged to say that being in deep mourning, and not naturally a dancer, she meant to dance every quadrille, if there were any difficulty about it, just to show what she thought of their nonsense. However, they all thought better of it before the evening. There were only three ladies out of the whole society absent, and an absolute difficulty about room for the dancers; and our aides-de-camp had quite a rest, from the ladies being engaged for seven or eight quadrilles. The Sikhs were very quiet and well-behaved. Two of them had seen English dancing before, and were aware that the ladies were ladies, and not nautch-girls; and I hope they explained that important fact to the others. If not we shall never know it, as there are hardly any of them that speak even Hindustani. I own, when some of the dancers asked for a waltz, which is seldom accomplished, even in Calcutta, I was afraid the Sikhs might have been a little astonished; and I think Govind Jus gave Golaub Singh a slight nudge as General K – whisked past with his daughter; but I dare say they thought it pretty. The victim G. talked to Ajeet Singh viâ Mr. B. all the evening, and occasionally I tried a little topic to help him, but they would not like much talk from a woman. The poor ignorant creatures are perfectly unconscious what a very superior article an Englishwoman is. They think us contemptible, if anything, which is a mistake. Mr. B. said he had never met with greater quickness in conversation than in that young Ajeet Singh. G. said that he regretted his ignorance of their language prevented his acquiring so much information respecting the maharajah as he wished, to which Ajeet Singh answered, that the Lord Sahib possessed the key of all knowledge in his natural talents and sense. I said to Mr. B., ‘Tell them that you are, in fact, Lord A.’s key of knowledge, as you expound everything to him.’ He translated this in his usual literal way, and Ajeet Singh paid him some compliment in return, and added, ‘But though the rays of the sun strike the earth, it is from the sun itself that the beam draws its light.’ They are all in a horrid fright of their master, which is not surprising. G. asked their opinion about a boat, one of the beautiful snake-boats with one hundred rowers which he is going to build as a present to Runjeet, and he wanted them to say what colours, ornaments, &c., would please him; but they declined giving any opinion on a subject that they had not been instructed to speak upon, and Mr. B. said he actually heard Ajeet Singh’s heart beat from fear that he might be led into any advice that might be repeated to Runjeet. Amongst the presents they brought there is such a lovely bed, with silver posts and legs, and yellow shawl curtains and counterpanes, and just the size for our little rooms at Kensington Gore. They can be had at Lahore for fifty pounds, and I certainly mean to bring one home. The silver is laid on very thin, and the shawls are not fine shawls, but the effect is very pretty.

CHAPTER XVIII

Friday, May 11, 1838.

WE went yesterday to the Sikh camp to see their troops. W., F., and I went on first, for when G. comes with his tail on there is such a kicking and fighting amongst the horses, that it is not pleasant with a thousand feet of precipices on one side of the road. G.’s horse was more than usually vicious, and came to a regular fight with Sir G.’s. I wish everybody would stick to their ponies in this country. The Sikhs had pitched a very pretty shawl tent for us, with a silver chair and footstool for G.; and the hills all round, with the Sikhs’ showy horses and bright dresses in the foreground, made as pretty a picture as it is possible to see. Their soldiers were something like our recruits, I thought, and their firing on horseback was very inferior to that of the local corps we saw on our march. Ajeet Singh joined in the firing at a mark, and seemed to shoot better than any of his followers, but there were always two or three of them who fired at the same time as he did, to make things quite certain. We had to ride home as hard as we could to be in time for a great dinner, and only had ten minutes for dressing. This morning G. had another durbar for a farewell to the deputation, and for giving presents in exchange of theirs. After the Sikhs had retired there were some hill rajahs introduced, rather interesting. One was the brother of an ex-rajah, whose eyes had been put out by the neighbour who took his territories. Another had been dethroned by Goulâb Singh, who is one of the most powerful chiefs, except Runjeet, and a horrid character. Half his subjects are deprived of their noses and ears. This poor dethroned man, after a little formal talk, suddenly snatched off his turban and flung it at George’s feet, and then threw himself on the ground, begging for assistance to get back his dominions. He cried like a child, and they say his story is a most melancholy one, but the Company are bound not to interfere. They can only give shelter in their territories.

Monday, May 14.

We had such a dreadful sermon at church yesterday from a strange clergyman. Mr. Y. always preaches here in the morning, and F. and I go in the afternoon to the church, when he has generally preached again; but yesterday this sick gentleman took it into his head he was well enough to preach. He is rather cracked, I should think, though Y. declares not; but I never will go again when he is to preach. He quoted quantities of poetry, and when he thought any of it particularly pretty, he said it twice over with the most ludicrous actions possible. Then he imitated the voice with which he supposed Lazarus was called to come forth, and which he said must have been very loud, or Lazarus would not have heard it, and so he hallooed till half Simla must have heard. Then he described an angel appearing – ‘a fine trumpeter;’ and he held out his black gown at its full extent, to show how the angel’s wings fluttered. All round the church people’s shoulders were shaking and their faces hid, and there was one moment when I was nearly going out, for fear of giving a scream. It was a most indecent exit at last. Even Sir G. R. came out, wiping his eyes, and I came home in one of those fits of laughing and crying which we used to have about ‘Pleasant but not correct,’ or such like childish jokes, which always ended by giving you a palpitation. W. and Captain M. went yesterday with the Sikhs on their way to Runjeet.

Thursday, May 17.

I have had a great deal to write and to copy for G. this week, and am amazingly backward in my letters, and I opine it must be the knowledge of that fact which has induced the Bombay Government not to advertise any steamers. Monday we had a great dinner. There is a very pretty Mrs. – up here – a sort of Malibran in look, but more regularly pretty, who also dined with us. Her husband cannot get leave from his office, and she is come up with two children, who look thoroughly Indianised. I always think those wives who are driven by health to be so many months away from their husbands, are rather in a dangerous situation in this country, where women are seldom left to take care of themselves; but she seems to be a very nice person, and there is something in extreme beauty that is very attractive. On Tuesday we dined with the Commander-in-Chief, in order to attend Capt. Q.’s wedding; it was got up with great care by the R.s. It went off remarkably well – Miss S. looked very pretty. Miss R., one bridesmaid, is rather handsome, and Miss T., the other, is a very handsome girl, but would have looked better if she had not ridden up from Barr (forty-two miles of the steepest hills) without stopping, whereby the sun had literally burnt all the skin off her shoulders through her habit. I lent her a blonde shawl, but it could not conceal the state of things. Most men talk of riding twenty miles in these mountains as a great feat, and I never can understand the extraordinary exertions that women sometimes make – and without dying of it, too.

There was no crying at the wedding, and the young couple went off in two jonpauns, carried one after the other. There was no spare house in Simla, and they had meant to go into tents, but Captains N. and M. handsomely offered their house, which is the most retired and one of the best here.

Saturday, May 19.

F. has heard from W., who had been assisting at the evening firing at a mark, which is a constant practice with the Sikhs. Ajeet Singh put in one of his spears at forty yards’ distance, and another at sixty, and put a mangoe on the head of one. He fired twenty times without hitting either. W. hit the mangoe at the second shot, and then hit the other spear three times running, and then thought it better to say he was tired, and could not shoot any more; so the Sikhs all said ‘Wah! wah!’ and were pleased. Dr. D. says the thermometer is at 96° in their tents with tatties, and outside there is a perfect simoom. Poor things! it is so pleasant here. All Dr. D.’s medicines and instruments have been stolen from his assistant’s tent. The stomach-pump was cut to pieces by the thieves – such a blessing for Runjeet’s courtiers! He tries all medical experiments on the people about him. How they would have been pumped!

Simla, Wednesday.

It appears the Journal I sent off to you last Saturday will probably pass a month at Bombay, where this may still find it. G., in the plentitude of his power, ordered off a steamer to the Persian Gulf, for the Persians are behaving very ill to us, and the second steamer, which was to have supplied its place and to have taken the overland mail, is disabled. The weather, for Simla, is wonderfully hot – I should say painfully so, if I did not recollect the plains. Dr. D. writes word that in their houses at Adeenanuggur (Runjeet’s abode), with tatties and every possible precaution, the thermometer ranges from 102° to 105°. Calcutta never gets up to that, and then it is comparatively cool there at night; whereas, these hot winds are just the same all through the twenty-four hours. W. does not mind them – at least, he says anything is better than Simla.

Thursday.

Our band played again yesterday at their new place, and it is a most successful attempt for the good of society, very much aided yesterday by the goodness of the strawberry ice. The weather is so dry and hot that Giles allowed us to have as many strawberries as could be picked, as they are all dying away. The strawberries here are quite as fine as in England, but they last a very short time. I never saw anything so pretty as the shrubs are just now. Both pink and white roses in large masses, and several other quite new shrubs. When we were riding yesterday we saw some coolies in the road with boxes on their heads, and I said, ‘Let us go to them and persuade them that one of those boxes is ours;’ and when we rode up there was one directed to G. We made sure it contained those bonnets of Mr. D.’s, which we have been looking for so long, but it turned out to be books, and a very neat selection – Ernest Maltravers, the Vicar of Wrexhill, Uncle Horace, Kindness in Women, &c., and some very amusing magazines.

We had read the Vicar of Wrexhill last week; I think it such a clever book, though wicked. Those bonnets must come at last. I never see those coolies come trotting along, having traversed half India, unwatched and unguarded, without having the greatest respect for their honesty and perseverance. They get about three rupees per month (six shillings), or sometimes four, for walking six hundred miles with a heavy box on their heads.

Saturday, June 9.

We went to the play last night. There is a little sort of theatre at Simla, small and hot and something dirty, but it does very well. Captain N. got up a prospectus of six plays for the benefit of the starving people at Agra, and there was a long list of subscribers, but then the actors fell out. One man took a fit of low spirits, and another who acted women’s parts well would not cut off his mustachios, and another went off to shoot bears near the Snowy Range. That man has been punished for his shilly-shallying; the snow blinded him, and he was brought back rolled up in a blanket, and carried by six men also nearly blind – he was entirely so for three days, but has recovered now. Altogether the scheme fell to the ground, which was a pity, as the subscriptions alone would have ensured 30l. every night of acting to those poor people. So when the gentlemen gave it up, the ‘uncovenanted service’ said they wished to try. The ‘uncovenanted service’ is just one of our choicest Indianisms, accompanied with our very worst Indian feelings. We say the words just as you talk of the ‘poor chimney-sweepers,’ or ‘those wretched scavengers’ – the uncovenanted being, in fact, clerks in the public offices. Very well-educated, quiet men, and many of them very highly paid; but as many of them are half-castes, we, with our pure Norman or Saxon blood, cannot really think contemptuously enough of them. In former days they were probably a bad class, but now a great many Europeans have been driven, by the failures of the banks here, to take that line, and amongst them are several thorough gentlemen. There were at least fifty of them in one camp attached to Government, and I never saw better behaved people. Some had horses, some gigs, and some their nice little wives in their nice little palkees; two wives and two families packed up together, for economy, with the two husbands riding by the side of the carriage. And then in the evening we used to hear A. and B., &c., disputing and lamenting that they could not allow Mr. V. and Mr. Z., and so on, to sit down in their presence. Well! I dare say it is all right, or at least we are all equally wrong, for they are not allowed to enter Government House; and I see how it would be impossible to ask a white Mr. and Mrs. Smith, though they are better looking than half the people we know, without hurting the feelings of a half-black Mr. Brown. Even at the theatres they have distinct places. Now they have wisely taken to the stage, a great many of the gentry were even above going to see them act. However, we went, and lent them the band, and the house was quite full – and they really acted remarkably well, one Irishman in particular. There is a son of Mr. F.’s amongst them. We always in camp used to call him Sophia; he looked like an actress dressed up in men’s clothes – little ringlets, and a little tunic, and a hat on one side. They have got Sophia to act their heroines, and she looks quite at her ease restored to her female style of dress, and is, I dare say, equally a good clerk in General C.’s office. The play was over soon after ten.

Wednesday, June 13.

The weather is very hot here now, much hotter than an English summer; at least nobody can go out after seven or before six, and the nights are very close; but of course everybody says it is a most extraordinary season, as they always do in India. It must end in rain soon; if it does not, the famine of this unfortunate country will be worse than ever. Captain M. and Mr. B. have both been ill with the dreadful heat at Adeenanuggur, and Dr. D. seems very anxious to get them away from there. I am quite sorry for the doctor. He left his little terrier here at his own house; it was a particularly clever little dog, and he doted on it, and there is very little doubt that it was eaten up, but whether by leopard or hyena remains a mystery. He will be wretched about it, and it places the happiness of the owners of little dogs generally on a wretchedly insecure footing.

We have had a slight disturbance in our household, the first serious one since we sent away those servants at Benares for taking presents. This time it was rather our fault. The Puttealah Rajah always sends, with his fruit and vegetables, various bottles, some containing rose water, and the others some sort of spirits. We ought to have broken the last, but we told the native servants to divide everything amongst them, and one of the kitmutgars, who got for his share a bottle of these spirits, asked some of the others to dine with him, took great care to drink nothing but water himself, and persuaded two others to get very drunk with what he called sherbet, and then they began to quarrel. It is such an extreme disgrace for a Mussulman to be drunk, and so degrading in the eyes of all the others, that J. turned them off forthwith. I was against it, as it had been a trick upon them, and partly our fault, but I only insisted on the giver of the feast being turned off too. As these men have only four shillings a week for themselves and families, of course they can save nothing, and if they are turned away at a distance from home they really may die of starvation. They went crying about for three or four days, and tried Giles and Wright, who could not interfere; and at last they watched me into my room yesterday, and came with two or three of the head servants to speak for them. I never can resist them; they cry, and knock their heads against the ground, and always make use of such touching expressions – that they are so very wicked, and so very unhappy, and that God forgives everybody their faults, and that they must and will die if they are not forgiven. However, I was very firm, and said I knew it was no use asking Major J., and that I never could look upon them again as respectable servants, and that none of the old servants ever gave them such an example, and would not like to associate with them. But then the old ones turned against me; and then I said, I would give them money to take them home, and then they cried still more about the disgrace; so at last I said I would ask Major J., though I was sure it was of no use, &c. Sometimes he does take it amiss; but this time he said, in his own diplomatic way, that in fact he had sent them to me, for he knew I should not resist their grief, and as he had sent them away he did not know how otherwise to help them. Giles, to whose department they belong, had been miserable about them.

CHAPTER XIX

Saturday, June 14, 1838.

MY last Journal departed this life on Tuesday last, and since then we have had almost unceasing rain, with a great deal of thick white fog, which I rather affection; it somehow has a smell of London, only without the taste of smoked pea-soup, which is more germane to a London fog, and consequently to my patriotic feelings. The rain last night washed down one house, and killed the man in it; and the roads have been carried down into the valleys, and the rocks washed into the roads, so that somehow our geography is not so clear as it was; but still it is cool, and what else is there that signifies in India?

My Journal must be so very dull here, that I am thinking of converting it into a weekly paper. We do not even give any dinners now (not that they would make any difference). I was thinking how much journals at home are filled with clever remarks, or curious facts, or even good jokes, but here it is utterly impossible to write down anything beyond comments on the weather, I declare I never hear in society anything that can be called a thing– not even an Indian thing – and I see in Sir James Mackintosh’s Life, which I am just finishing for the third time, that, in his Indian journal, there is nothing but longings after home, and the workings of his own brain, and remarks on books; whereas, in his English and Paris journals, there are anecdotes and witticisms of other people, and a little mental friction was going on.

I am interested in Indian politics just now, but could not make them interesting on paper. Herât is still defending itself, but the Russians are egging on the Persians, and their agents are trying to do all the mischief they can on our frontier. Two Russian letters were intercepted, and sent to G. yesterday; highly important, only unluckily nobody in India can read them. The aides-de-camp have been all day making facsimiles of them, to send to Calcutta, Bombay, &c., in hopes some Armenian may be found who will translate them. It would be amusing if they turned out a sort of ‘T. and E. Journal;’ some Caterina Iconoslavitch writing to my uncle Alexis about her partners.

I went through the thick fog this morning to visit the R.s, and found them in a great fuss. They had been trying to get news in every direction without success. ‘Pray, is it true what we heard yesterday morning, that the Governor-General had said he would burn Herât if he could?’ I said it sounded plausible, as he probably did not wish Herât to fall into the enemy’s hands. ‘Well, but then we heard that the Governor-General had said, in the afternoon, that he was against any warlike measure whatever; that contradicts the morning story.’ I recommended that they should always believe the afternoon anecdotes, because G. sees people in the morning, and he sees nobody after luncheon, so that what he says to other people might be less than the truth, but that what he says to himself, in the afternoon, must clearly be the real state of the case.

Sunday, June 17.

Still pouring! and our congregation consisted of only eight people besides Mr. Y.; but it cleared at five, and we rode all round ‘Jacko,’ the imposing name of our highest mountain, as hard as we could canter. The hills were really beautiful to-night, a sea of pinkish white clouds rolling over them, and some of their purple heads peering through like islands. It was a pleasure to look at anything so beautiful and so changeable. The clouds drew up like curtains in massy folds every now and then, and there were the valleys grown quite green in three days, just tinged with the sunbeams, the sun itself hidden; and the want of shape for which these hills are to blame on common occasions was disguised by all this vapoury dress. I love hills, but I have discovered by deep reflection that we are such artificial animals, that the recollections of art are much more pleasing and stronger in my mind than those of nature. In thinking over past travels, Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross’ at Antwerp, and Canova’s ‘Magdalene,’ and one or two Vandycks at Amsterdam, and parts of Westminster Abbey and of York Minster, come constantly into my thoughts; and I can see all the pictures at Panshanger, particularly the Correggio, and many of those at Woburn and Bowood, as clearly as if they were hanging in this room. There is a bit of grey sky in that ‘Descent from the Cross’ I shall never forget, whereas Killarney, and the Rhine, and the Pyrenees are all confused recollections, pleasant but not clear. And I am sure that in this country, though I do not admire Indian architecture, I shall recollect every stone of the Kootûb and every arch about it, when these mountains will be all indistinct. In short, notwithstanding that ‘God made the country and man made the town,’ I, after the fashion of human nature, enjoy most what God has given, and remember best what man has done. How do you feel about nature and art? Don’t you love a fine picture? After all, it is only nature caught and fixed. Another thing is, that all my associations with pictures and statues are those of pleasant society, and friends, and good houses, and youth and happiness, though I should love them for their own sakes too.

Simla, Wednesday, June 20.

I sent off another lump of Journal last Saturday, but somehow I feel none of those last letters are sure of reaching you. They will be drowned going overland, after the contrarious way of the world. We might have had your April packet by this time, but the Bombay dâk has not been heard of at all for five days, and it is supposed the rivers have overflowed and that all your dear little letters are swimming for their lives. Our rains have begun, but they are not very different from English rains – at least hitherto it has been fine half the day. On Saturday morning they began with a grand thunder-storm, and a great splash of water, which would have been pleasant only that it took a wrong direction, and somehow settled in my ceiling, from which it descended in a variety of small streams, after the fashion of a gigantic shower-bath, on my carpet, tables, &c. Giles rushed in at the head of a valiant band of khalasses (Indian house-maids of the male gender), and carried off my books and pictures, and nothing was hurt, only you know your face might have been entirely washed out, which, as there is not another like it within 15,000 miles, would have been an irreparable calamity. The rest of the house behaved itself beautifully, and my room was put to rights in twenty-four hours. The instant these leaks are discovered, the flat roofs are covered with natives thumping away at the mud of which they are composed, as if noise were no grievance. A strange delusion!