Chhokrapur is lovely in the evening twilight. Standing by the Dilkhusha tank to-day, I watched for a little the imperceptible transition of day into night. Over the water the spur of hill on which my house stands was black and featureless, but behind it, edging with light the cypresses and the speared dome of the Hanuman temple upon the crest, the sky was pale green and of curious depth, like the eyes of a lover into which we hungrily gaze, believing that here at last, where the light seems so clear, we shall find truth. Above, lifted by the cypress plumes, Venus brightly shone, and lay also at my feet a pale, quivering starfish below the silver surface of the water. The air was full of the sweet scent of the dust. In the far distance a pipe thrilled, and along the stone margin of the lake a turbaned boy walked towards me, salaamed, and gathering earth from the pathway, descended the steps to wash his hands. I continued on my way, and as I walked on I heard him, out of sight, singing to himself, his voice mingling with the reedy music of the pipe.
The night is always full of strange sounds. There is the throb of the tom-tom, at one house or another, keeping up marriage celebrations or other festivities till the dawn, accompanied by the rapid chanting of the musicians; and there is the screaming of the jackals. Encouraged by the darkness, these beasts come foraging into the town itself at night, and the noise they make is human and terrible, like a scream of pain.
Indeed, until this evening, I believed these appalling wails were really uttered by human beings, though I had forgotten to ask why; but when they began to-night, quite close to my house, Babaji Rao was sitting with me, and he told me they were only the voices of the jackals.
“There was once a very simple king,” he began immediately, in his pedantic way, passing a hand over his bald head, and told me this story. “There was once a very simple king who, hearing the jackals howl constantly outside his palace, said to his minister, ‘What are they crying for—those poor animals?’ ‘They are cold,’ said the resourceful minister, ‘and are crying for warm clothing. Poor brutes! They have nothing to put on at all, not even a loincloth, no matter how cold the weather is.’ ‘How much will it cost to clothe all the jackals in my kingdom?’ asked his sovereign. ‘At least ten thousand rupees,’ said the resourceful minister. ‘See that it is done,’ said the simple king. But a few days later he heard them wailing again. ‘Are those jackals not yet clothed?’ he asked. ‘Yes, sire.’ ‘Then why do they still cry?’ ‘They are thanking you for your charity towards them,’ said the astute minister.”
JANUARY 25TH
When I walked this morning to the post-office, I met an elephant with a load of rushes and grass entering the town from the Eastern Gate. The Maharajah does not any longer keep elephants, and this is the first I have seen in Chhokrapur. Later on I learnt the reason: this is the birthday of the Elephant-headed God, Ganesh, and a day of fasting. A fair was to be held in commemoration, and in the early part of the afternoon His Highness came to take me to it.
“Maharajah Sahib! Maharajah Sahib!” chattered the gray-bearded Munshi, appearing in my doorway and pointing down the drive. With the exception of Hashim, whose wooden impassivity is only relaxed when he is playing with his baby and a sweet, tender smile lights his face, all the Guest House servants get excited at His Highness’s arrival, and tidy themselves, and stand up ready to bow their foreheads to the ground. But Munshi is always the most moved, and indeed seems endowed with a special faculty for sensing the approach of his royal master, for even before the car is in sight upon the plain below, he pops out of the storeroom or the cookhouse and stands gazing towards the Palace. Narayan says that he is not to be trusted; that if I kept the keys of the storeroom myself that transfer alone would help considerably to decrease Guest House expenses; and if this is true the old man’s alertness is explained on other grounds than those of zeal or devotion. I heard the car arrive, and putting on my topee went out to meet the Maharajah.
“It is all finished! All finished!” he cried out to me in a tragic voice as I approached.
“What is all finished?” I inquired, getting in.
“Napoleon the Third. His uncle is very sick. They say he must die.”
Having announced this, he dropped his hands despairingly in his lap, and turned his face away.
“Dear, dear! But isn’t that exactly what you wanted?” I asked.
“But, my dear sir, if he dies now I shall lose the boy for ever! Such bad news! I have not liked singing or dancing since I heard it.”
I did not quite follow this, so it was explained to me that some two hundred miles separated the boy, in Cawnpore, from his dying uncle, while another two hundred miles separated the uncle from His Highness, and that if a definite arrangement was not made and the nephew handed over to His Highness before the uncle expired, other and unprincipled persons, like wolves always on the watch for such morsels, would grab the boy. “Never a very strong man,” remarked His Highness irritably, referring to the uncle.
“Well,” I said, “perhaps if Napoleon is a good nephew and has any proper feelings he will go and visit the poor old chap on his death-bed, and so if you send a man along at the same time you will be able to complete the transaction.”
“Just what I’m hoping!” exclaimed the King.
The fair was a local one, held round the temple of Ganesh. His Highness stopped the car on the road near by and told me to go and look round and then return to him.
The temple stood on a little knoll, and was hardly more than a shrine containing an image of the God about two hundred and fifty years old, which I was not permitted to see.
The knoll was enclosed by a wall with a gate from which white stone steps mounted to the shrine, and these steps and the slopes of the hill were thronged with Hindoos dressed in bright colors, while outside the wall and round the gateway were merchants and pedlars, selling cloth, sweetmeats, and shoes. There was not a very large number of people there, but then it was getting late in the day; the shrine had been open to supplicants since the early morning and would be closed at eight o’clock. It is an important religious occasion, and by the end of the day every Hindoo in Chhokrapur will have visited the shrine and sacrificed to the God. The sacrifice is a cocoanut, which each worshipper brings with him and breaks before the image; after which a garland of marigolds is hung round his neck by the priest.
His Highness explained all this and about cocoanuts when I returned to him. There was once a monk or sage who, as far as I remember, fought against Indra, the King of the Gods, and was defeated by him. At any rate he was very cross, and told Indra that he would go away and create a world of his own which would be a great improvement on Indra’s, and when he had made sufficient men he would fight him again. His idea (which he kept secret was to grow adult men on trees, instead of having all this protracted business of love, gestation, and upbringing.
Indra laughed at him; but when he looked down from Mount Kylash a little later on and saw what was going on he became rather alarmed; for the sage had been as good as his word, and was growing men in plantations. Then all the Gods came down and implored him to desist, which he was eventually persuaded to do, so that of the new men nothing more was grown than their heads, which are still to be seen hanging from the cocoanut palm, and which were smashed to-day, as representing the human head, before the image of the Elephant-headed God.
JANUARY 28TH
When His Highness came to call for me this afternoon, I was greeted in the same way as on the last occasion.
“It is all finished! All finished!”
So this time I did not require to be told what was all finished. “Napoleon the Third,” I said.
“He isn’t coming! Phutt!” He clapped his hands once to express conclusion.
It appeared that a messenger had been sent with five hundred rupees to the uncle, who, it was thought, now that he was dying, would probably take far less than he had demanded when he was not. But the messenger, in an attempt to win favor with his master, had exceeded his authority and lost all. Hoping to get
Napoleon for less money still, he had passed over the uncle in favor of a neighboring aunt, who had asserted that she was the only person who had the legal right to dispose of the boy, and that His Highness should have him for four hundred rupees. Bundling the messenger forthwith to the railway station, she had taken him to Cawnpore; but on arrival there they had been informed by another uncle, temporarily in charge of the company, that, oddly enough, the boy had just gone to visit this very aunt in her village. They must have passed him on the way. So they returned in haste. But the boy was not there, and had not been there, and was not with his sick uncle either. So back again they journeyed to Cawnpore, only to learn that the boy had been sold for five hundred rupees to another company, and was on his way to Calcutta.
“What must I do? What must I do?” asked His Highness.
I had listened to this story with increasing bewilderment, and felt, at the end of it, confused and feeble. Somewhere in the middle, somewhere between Cawnpore and the abode of the crafty aunt, I too had got lost; but even while I was preparing to question His Highness he diverted my attention to a tree growing by the roadside.
“Do you see that tree?” he said. “It is very rare and is called ‘Kalap—The Tree of Illusion,’ because it once grew on Olympus, in the garden of Zeus, and whatever his supplicants wished for—food, money, friendship, happiness—he would pluck it from that tree and give it to them.”
“Then why don’t you transplant one to your Palace courtyard, King,” I asked, “and pray beneath it for your heart’s desire? With a little faith you might get Napoleon the Third to grow on it, like a cocoanut. Why don’t you?”
“I have!” he cried. “I do! In secret. But nothing comes . . . nothing. All that is—gone!”
But in spite of the melancholy of his words, he seemed, I thought, less upset than might have been expected by the reverse he had suffered in this latest Napoleonic campaign, and became, indeed, as time went on, quite sprightly, remarking, as we passed a pretty grassy slope scattered with trees:
“If there were Greeks and Romans on that I would play hide and go seek with them.”
We were on our way to the village of Chetla, where a fair was being held, and where also, His Highness told me, there was a very beautiful boy, son of a betel-leaf planter, on whose appearance the King wanted my opinion.
We saw the boy first. The car was stopped soon after entering the village; there were men standing about outside their mud-houses, and word was passed along for the boy, who soon appeared from a neighboring doorway and came running up. He was lean and hideous. After they had conversed a little and salutations had again passed, we drove on, His Highness avoiding my eye; but when we were out of sight, he looked at me mischievously and dissolved into hoarse laughter.
“I would not have known him,” he said. “He is all shrunk away. What did you think?”
“Very disappointing,” I answered.
“Very disappointing,” he echoed.
The chief industry of Chetla is the cultivation of the betel-leaf, for which the soil of Chhokrapur is not suited; it is a thriving trade, and Chetla is the most prosperous village in the State, its people being so rich and independent that when His Highness has tried to hire servants from among them he has always met with the same reply: “Why should we come and serve you? We keep servants of our own.”
“They are very quarrelsome and cantankerous,” he remarked bitterly.
We were passing between betel-leaf plantations while he spoke; large areas enclosed in rush and bamboo fencing to a height of about ten feet, and lightly roofed with the same materials. I asked to be allowed to enter one, and His Highness stopped the car and told his cousin to take me. From the door of the plantation into the interior a long straight pathway ran, two or three feet wide, and at right angles to this, on either side, regular lines of bamboos, up which the plants crawled, had been set very close together, so that there was left only sufficient room for one man to pass between them. The atmosphere was cold, odorous, and subaquaeous, the large bright green leaves coloring the light. Very thick and luxuriant they grew, constantly in need of water; and for my benefit a farmer, naked except for a loincloth, brought a large earthenware lutiya of water and showed me how the watering was done. It was simple and graceful. Retreating backwards down one of the narrow ways between the bamboo stems, he thrust his left hand, palm upwards, into the mouth of the vessel, which was on his left shoulder, and pulling it forward allowed the water to flow out in front of him. Then extending his right hand into the stream, he distributed it, by a slight manual movement, to the betel roots on either side.
When we came out again into the sunlight a little boy presented me with a pile of stemless marigolds which he had been told to pick for me from the small garden that brightened the entrance to the plantation. Thanking him, I took them in the palms of my hands, and nursed them while we visited the fair. It was concentrated in what I suppose was the high street; stalls of sweetmeats and merchandise lined the gutters, and a large crowd of people pressed round them, filling up the road. We did no more than push slowly up and down again in the car, pressing the people back to either side like bushes which swung together again behind us. There was a good deal of noise, laughter, and commentary, and not nearly as much obeisance as the King received when driving through the streets of Chhokrapur; but it all looked to me good-natured enough, though I did not understand the comments. His Highness sat well back, raising his hand perfunctorily every now and then whether he was saluted or not, and shaking gently with laughter when anything particularly amusing happened—as when, for instance, an old man was rolled into the gutter by the mudguard, or a boy pressed a rude grimace against the window. Soon, however, we were clear of the crowd—except for two or three small boys who were adhering to the sides of the car like burrs to clothes, and had to be flicked off by the King’s cousin with a long whip always carried for dispersing goats or cows or other nuisances.
“King,” I said, as we left Chetla behind; “can I throw these lovely flowers away?”
“Yes,” he said; “but throw them into a bush, so that they will not be trodden under foot.”
I did so; and after a moment he said gently:
“Please do not call me ‘King’; that is what my dear tutor used to call me; I do not want any one else to use it.”
“Very well,” I said, “but ‘Maharajah Sahib’ is such a mouthful.”
“Then call me ‘Prince’.”
“All right. Now what about ‘Mr. Ackerley’? Isn’t that rather a mouthful for you?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “I like it very much. I will tell you something, but you will think me very silly. When I first heard your name, it made me think of a stream of water running over little stones.”
I remember Miss Gibbins, when she was staying in the Guest House a month ago, saying how frequently her night’s rest was disturbed by the noises the guard used to make on the verandah outside—coughing and spitting over their brazier, or talking, awake and asleep. Once, when she was disturbed by some sound, she looked through the doorway and saw “a singular figure in the moonlight—a lean figure upon an emaciated white horse, looking like the White Knight in Alice through the Looking-Glass.” In the vigorous language of those accustomed to command and be obeyed, she would order them to be silent or to go away; but I am not very good at this. Always at night, and sometimes, when the weather is bad, in the daytime, my front verandah is thronged with odd, derelict, tattered figures. A small bundle of dirty straw in the corner (eaten during the day by cows, which sometimes blunder into my sitting-room in search of further provender) is used by the guard at night to protect their bodies from the harshness of the concrete floor; and there they lie, wrapped up like mummies in their blankets; or squat smoking over a brazier, passing the pipe from hand to hand, their thin rumps just clear of the ground, their backs curved, their arms dangling over their knees, looking like a cluster of bedraggled birds.
I peer out at them. Besides the guard the
re are two men, poor, emaciated, huddled face to face under one blanket, and in the far corner is an old woman, shrouded in her rusty red shawl, with rings on her toes and an ornament in her nostril. She too is on her haunches, smoking a fragment of a pipe in solitude, a brazier between her thin brown wrinkled legs.
I peer out at her. She perceives the glint of my eye in the window and draws her shawl across her face. I retreat to my book. Through the cracks of the door the charcoal fumes enter and the muffled conversation of the guard or of the two men lying together under one blanket.
Some one chokes and chokes as though he would die. The pipe is passing. Soon it will return to him, and he will choke again, and there will be muffled laughter. I retreat to my bed, and lie alone under my blanket, while the pipe passes. . . .
FEBRUARY 3RD
Napolean the Third is in Chhokrapur. He arrived last night, under escort and unpaid for. His Highness professes complete innocence. How was he to know that the messenger would go and kidnap the boy? It is a “great nuisance,” especially since the sick uncle, whose death now would be of considerable assistance, is reported to be rallying. There may be a scandal . . . legal proceedings.
What is he to do? He is “very upset.” Napoleon also is “very upset.” Indeed the escort had great trouble with him. He protested shrilly all the way from Cawnpore. He does not want to live in Chhokrapur. He is used to constant change and constant excitement and big cities. He will not live in Chhokrapur. He will make trouble. He will get his aunt to make trouble. She is on her way here now. She, too, is “very upset.”
Abdul took me for a walk to-day, “to converse upon natural objects in Hindi—in this way you will learn to speak very well.” He was wearing an enormous, rather dirty brown topee, of which he was evidently very proud but which considerably subtracted from his appearance by swallowing up almost all of his head and neck. The indispensable gamp was beneath his arm.
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