Hindoo Holiday (3 page)

“Have you had your tea?” he asked. I said I had ordered it, and he told his Secretary to hurry it up; but at that moment it arrived, borne by a tall, handsome waiter in a long, blue uniform coat with a sash round his waist.

He shuffled off his shoes outside the door, and entered with bare feet.

“Won't you join me?” I asked His Highness, for there was only one cup; “or have you had your tea already?”

This amused them both, and the Maharajah explained that, although it was all very silly and nothing to do with him, Hindoos were not permitted to eat with Europeans. I apologized for my blunder; but he waved it aside with a small jeweled hand, saying that, as a matter of fact, he didn't conform strictly to the rule, and sometimes took a cup of tea with his guests, but that he didn't feel inclined for one just now.

“Now take your tea,” he said, “and I will keep my questions for when you have finished.”

So, rather self-consciously, I chewed leathery buttered toast, while they sat and watched me and exchanged remarks in Hindi—His Highness smoking a cigarette with a purple tip; Babaji Rao with his legs wide apart, his elbows out, and his hands planted firmly upon his knees. He was not much better to look at than his master, I thought. Smallpox had ravaged his face; a ragged mustache drooped untidily over his big, loose mouth, and behind large spectacles his small brown eyes seemed evasive and sly. His costume was much the same as the Maharajah's, but dingy and of coarse material; he wore neither socks nor collar, and a brass stud shone beneath his unshaven chin. When he took off his round black hat I saw that the top of his head was bald, and that the thick untidy fringe round the sides and back was turning gray.

His Highness did not manage however to keep all his questions for when I had finished.

“How do you say your name?” he asked.

I told him, and he repeated it after me until he got it right, and then glanced at his secretary as much as to say, “Remember that.”

“Do you like this?” He indicated the walls. “Is it comfortable? If there is anything you want you must tell Babaji Rao. I thought you would like to stay here instead of in the Guest House with my other guests.”

“Is that the Guest House?” I asked, looking at the square building outside. “I thought it was your Palace.”

“No, no, no,” he said, subsiding into wheezy laughter, and I was astonished to see that his tongue was bright orange—almost the color of nasturtium.

I put the last piece of toast into my mouth, and no sooner had I done so than he asked—

“Have you finished your tea?”

—and called the waiter to clear it away before I could maneuver the toast into a position that would enable me to reply.

Then began a very bewildering examination of my history. It jumped from one thing to another without pause, and was too long and confusing to reproduce.

How old was I? So old? He had been under the impression that I was only twenty-two. Did I come from London? Of whom did my family consist? Could I speak Latin and Greek? Did I know Rider Haggard? Had I read his books? Was I religious? Did I believe that the tragedy of Jesus Christ was the greatest tragedy that had ever happened? Was I a pragmatist? Had I read Hall Caine? Had I read Darwin, Huxley, and Marie Corelli? . . .

His Highness seemed very disappointed. I didn't know what “Pragmatism” meant, and had read practically none of the authors he named. I must read them at once, he said, for they were all very good authors indeed, and he wished me to explain them to him. He had them all in his library in the Palace; I must get them out and read them. He was practically toothless, I noticed, and his brown lips sank in and blew out tremulously as he mumbled his questions.

“Have you read Spencer's
First Principles
, and
Problems of Life and Mind
by Lewes?” he asked.

“No, Maharajah Sahib, I'm afraid I haven't.”

His face took on a very grave expression.

“But you must do so. It is very important. You must do so at once. It is the first thing I wish you to do.”

“Very well, Maharajah Sahib.”

“Babaji Rao will give them to you. You must give them to him to-night, Babaji Rao. Lewes refutes Spencer. Spencer says . . . What does he say, Babaji Rao? Explain it.”

The Secretary cleared his throat, and passed a nervous hand over his bald head.

“Spencer says that there is a reality behind appearances, and Lewes . . .”

“Is there a God or is there no God?” rapped out His Highness impatiently. “That is the question. That is what I want to know. Spencer says there
is
a God, Lewes says no. So you must read them, Mr. Ackerley, and tell me which of them is right.”

He got up to go. I felt I had not made at all a good impression and that he was disappointed in me. Before leaving he asked me about the expenses I had incurred during my journey, and told me to give an account of them to the Secretary, for he wished to refund them at once.

When he reached the doorway he turned:

“At last we are face to face!” he said, and then shuffled out, very stiffly, on splayed feet, to his car.

The “other guests”—who are living in the large Guest House —are five persons and two dogs. The five persons are Captain Montgomery, I. M. S., and his wife; Major Pomby of the Gunners; a naval Commander on leave from his ship in the Persian Gulf, and Miss Gibbins. All of them, with the exception of the Commander, are from Shikaripur, the chief military station in the Province. The two dogs are Titus and Lulu.

They were all just returning from a jackal-hunt yesterday evening when Babaji Rao took me over; I felt I did not like any of them very much—though the men seemed kinder and were certainly quieter than the women—and I rather resented their presence here.

Perhaps they resented mine; at any rate after giving me the most perfunctory welcome, they paid practically no further attention to me, and by the time we were all dressed and sitting down to dinner I felt quite excluded from their society. I sat stolidly among them and took in my surroundings—the spacious and enormously high rooms of the Guest House, furnished with carpets, rugs, easy-chairs, and pictures of Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales. The conversation, which was chiefly between the two women, who talked very loudly in an easy, smart manner, was frequently amusing; but they employed so many Anglo-Indian words that I found it rather difficult to follow.

“I suppose you think we're all crazy?” Mrs. Montgomery asked.

“A little incomprehensible,” I said.

An incident had occurred while they were out riding, and Mrs. Montgomery related it with indignation.

“Vera (Miss Gibbins) had to dismount to pick up a glove she'd dropped, and had difficulty in mounting again. There was a cultivator standing close by, doing absolutely nothing to help—just looking on—so I called out, ‘Boy! Come and hold this lady's horse!' And what d'you think he said? ‘I'm not your slave, miss.' Would you believe it? Dirty brute! ‘Come here at once and do what you're told!' I shouted. ‘Then I come,' he said, as impudent as you please. But Vera was trembling with rage by that time, and wouldn't let him touch her horse. I never heard such damned cheek!”

The two dogs wandered round the table begging, and the Commander said that when he and Miss Gibbins had gone for a walk before breakfast she had hit a pie-dog with a stone.

“Yes, wasn't it awful?” cried Miss Gibbins. “And I never do hit anything. I picked up a stone, and with unerring precision hit the wretched animal in the stomach. I
was
surprised!”

Mrs. Montgomery laughed.

“And I remember throwing a stone at a septic little boy,” she said, “and it hit a Tommy instead—a huge rock struck him on the chest! And all he said was ‘That's all right, miss. Don't you take on!'”

“Titus and Lulu had a fight in my bedroom this morning,” remarked Miss Gibbins. “It was Lulu's fault. She gave Titus such an ugly look and made a grab at him as I hauled him rapidly on to the bed, and if he hadn't been an expert in giving corkscrew twists to his idiot tail he would never have evaded her clutches! Then I gave Lulu a good swift kick through the door, and she rose about six feet in the air, and disappeared in a cloud of dust and small stones.”

This caused general amusement.

“Do you remember Maggie?” she asked Mrs. Montgomery. “She was a toy dog about this size—ever so small. We called her ‘The Dustbin Queen.' She used to get into enormously high dustbins—Heaven knows how she did it—and gorge on garbage until her brain was inflamed with meat. Once she stayed in a dustbin for forty-eight hours.”

I found this kind of conversation so remarkable that I began to note it down on the backs of envelopes under cover of the table.

Babaji Rao took me and the two women down to see the Dewan's garden this morning. It is on the outskirts of the town and is called the garden of Dilkhusha or Heart's Ease. The Dewan, or Prime Minister, himself accompanied us. He is an enormously fat man, with small well-shaped hands, with which he frequently gesticulated. He was very voluble and excitable, and his voice, which even normally was surprisingly high for his age and bulk, rose often to a shrill cry. His features, too, were strangely small and refined in the midst of his heavy cheeks and jowls, and his color was much paler than Babaji Rao's or the Maharajah's. It was a large and pretty garden, and he showed us a fine banyan tree, which, he said, lives for ever, each branch thrusting down a new root into the earth. Before we left, his gardener brought garlands of jasmine and marigold which the Dewan hung round our necks.

We all drove to Mahua this afternoon, a village about ten miles away, where the Maharajah has another palace. It is empty, and is never used by His Highness, I am told, except to entertain his guests to tea; but it is much more beautiful in itself and in its setting than the rather dingy stuccoed palace he inhabits here. The garden was luxuriant, but carefully kept, and monkeys could be seen hopping about on the walls, behind the purple shrubs and the heavy foliage of banana-trees, or peering anxiously round the ornamentation of the roof. Passing through the courtyard where a guard was stationed, and mounting a long flight of stone steps, we reached, through a narrow walled passage, a beautiful arcaded upper court of red gravel; on to it the reception room opened in its whole length front of us, its roof supported on slender columns. It was gaily carpeted, and a long table was already spread with tea, cakes, sweets, and fruit. We passed through this room on to the quayside of a lovely reservoir, a great clear lake stretching away for half a mile or more, and locked by rocky hills with wooded slopes. There were two ancient royal tombs among the trees upon the farther borders of the lake. Just in front of us on the quayside, where the water was rimmed with steps and two dinghies lay moored, a carpet had been spread and set with chairs and a table; and there sat His Highness in the shade of a
peepal
tree. After we had had tea, the women, the Commander, and

Major Pomby went out in one of the dinghies, which had been fitted with an engine; and Captain Montgomery and I were left with His Highness. We discussed books in a desultory fashion—Sir Philip Gibbs, Hall Caine, Meredith, Marie Corelli; and His Highness said he was very anxious that I should read
The Eternal City
, but it was unaccountably missing from the library, and Babaji Rao, who was searching everywhere for it, had not yet found it.

He then took us up on to the roof of the Palace, where we had a view of some very beautiful ruined temples, two hundred years old, which his grandfather had destroyed.

“Why are ruins beautiful?” he asked. “And what is beauty? Is it the cloak of God?”

Hindoos believe in one impersonal God, Brǎhma, the Universal Spirit or Energy, pervading, constituting everything. Like the banyan tree in the Dewan's garden, it is forever evolving itself out of itself. Brǎhma is neuter; but it has developed a triple personality, three masculine deities called Brǎhma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Siva, the Dissolver and Reproducer. These three principal personalities are sometimes considered as co-equal and their functions interchangeable; they are constantly manifested and finally reabsorbed into the one eternal, impersonal Essence, Brǎhma.

Another jackal-hunt was arranged this morning, and Mrs. Montgomery asked me if I would like to join. I said that although I had done a little riding and had always, so far, managed to stay on my horse, I had never hunted in my life and was afraid I might be a nuisance to the party; but she said it was not really a hunt, but only a way of passing the time and exercising themselves and Titus. She is reputed to be a very good horsewoman, the best in Shikaripur.

Hitherto I had not liked her; her rather small eyes behind her pince-nez had seemed severe and hard; but now she was making herself agreeable to me, and looked more kind and attractive. I accepted. The Commander was not riding with us, and Miss Gibbins borrowed his hat to wear. It didn't fit.

“I detest your septic hat,” she remarked. “It wobbles up and down on my idiot bun.”

But she kept it nevertheless. The words “idiot” and “septic” are used very frequently in this sense as terms of disparagement by both the women. Also the word “lethal.” All Indians, it seems, are either “lethal” or “septic.”

While we rode, Mrs. Montgomery drew me back and said:

“You know you gave us all a bit of a shock here at the first kick-off. You didn't introduce yourself. That isn't done in India. You ought to have labeled yourself at once—we all have labels out here, so that we know where we are, so to speak; so you should have told us all about yourself at once—where you come from, your parents, school, “varsity, profession, business, and so on. But you didn't. You just sat still and left us guessing, and that creates a bad impression. Luckily for you, we're rather different; we're jolly, unconventional sorts; but if you don't label yourself at once to the people round here, the Rajgarh ladies, for instance—especially the old ones—won't know you after the first five minutes.”