Emily Eden

Simla, Wednesday, August 8, 1838.

I OUGHT to have begun again sooner, as my last Journal was sent off this day week, but it appears it will have to wait at Bombay till the eighth of next month, so, as you may receive two at once, it will be rather in your favour if one week is omitted.

It has rained almost literally without ceasing, with constant fog; but if it is clear for ten minutes the beauty of the hills is surpassing; such masses of clouds about them and below them, and they are so purple and so green at this time of year.

August 18.

We had to go to another play last night. Luckily they only acted two farces, so we were home at ten, but anything much worse I never saw. There were three women’s parts in the last farce, and the clerks had made their bonnets out of their broad straw hats tied on; they had gowns with no plaits in them, and no petticoats nor bustles. One of them, a very black half-caste, stood presenting his enormous flat back to the audience, and the lover observed, with great pathos, ‘Upon my soul! that is a most interesting-looking little gurl.’

It seems very uncertain when our next overland packet will come. The steamers could not get there, and there is nothing but an Arab sailing-vessel to bring the letters here. I have no faith in the Arabs as postmen. I had two here yesterday to draw. They followed Captain B. from Cabul, and are genuine ‘Children of the Desert.’ They are very unlike our quiet natives, and laughed so much all the time, that I could hardly draw them; but they make excellent sketches. I often wish for Landseer here.

Wednesday, Aug. 22.

There! this must go. We had a great dinner on Monday, and another fainting lady. Somebody always faints here. I myself believe that, though they do not like to say so, it is the fleas that make them ill. You cannot imagine the provocation of those animals during the rains. W. was really ill for two days with them—irritation and want of sleep—and was obliged to see Dr. D. The worst of it is, that the more the house is cleaned and tormented, the worse the fleas get. They belong to the soil, and even the flower-garden is full of them. They say that plague is to cease next month, which is a comfort.

A box of new books arrived yesterday, just as we were at the last gasp—and such a good set! Perhaps the Annuals might have been left out, but other people like to see them; and then, by great good luck, we had not seen one of the other books, though they had been nine months coming. ‘Lady Annabella,’ ‘Ethel Churchill,’ ‘Pascal Bruno,’ &c. We are now in that age of literature. I wish you would buy on my account a copy of ‘La Marquise de Pontange’ and ‘Le PÈre Goriot,’ and send them out, and I wish you would send yourself out with them. That would be the real book to read over again.

[A portion of the Journal being lost, these letters of the same dates are here inserted, to carry on the narrative.]

Letter to the Countess of B.

Simla, August 20, 1838.

My dearest Sister,

I am going to run off a few short letters to-day and to-morrow, just to show what I would have done, if letters would ever go—but they won’t. They say there is an accumulation of three months’ letters lying at Bombay. There has been a monsoon, and a want of coals, and a burst boiler, and every sort of excuse. I wish, when you are driving about, you would just call at the dockyards[C] in your neighbourhood, and mention that we are not at all satisfied with the steamers they send us out; that you think yourself, their last bowsprits are a shame to be seen, and you might add, that if you do not get your letters a little more regularly, you really must speak about employing some other cast-iron men. Somehow, out of four steamers at Bombay, there has not been one available, and we are now expecting our letters of June by some Arab proa, or some sailing-vessel. We may expect, I fancy, with a witness! I have not much news for you, as I doubt (though I think you a wonderfully clever woman) whether you are quite up to the nuances of the Cabul and Candahar politics.

[C] Woolwich.

We gain one little good by this war. The army cannot muster at Ferozepore till the 20th of November, and Sir G. R. wishes G. not to meet Runjeet Singh till he can escort him at the head of 10,000 men, so that gives us three more cool weeks here, and takes off three very hot weeks of the plains. The heat subsides about December. F. and I shall be the only ladies in the whole camp. All our own ladies stay up here, bored to death to be without their husbands, but they would be still more bored if they had to drag their children through another long march. Besides, there are great difficulties this time for tents, carriages, &c., and then it is to be hoped we shall make a much shorter journey, and come up here again.

It has rained without ceasing since I wrote last—an excellent thing for India, and not so unpleasant for us as it sounds.

When I say ‘without ceasing,’ it very often stops raining for half an hour in the afternoon, and then the drip and the fog do not count.

We all get on our ponies the moment it is fair, and go cantering past each other, saying, ‘How delightful to be out again,’ and ‘I think we shall get wet’—and then that is enough exercise for two days. It is supposed the rains are breaking up now, as we have had three fine evenings, one of which we devoted to dropping in after dinner familiarly at the Commander-in-chief’s, to have tea and a rubber of whist.

Don’t you see how free-and-easy that looked? Three jonpauns—like upright coffins—rushing rapidly through the bazaar, with a long train of torch-bearers and hirkarus and three aides-de-camp, in full uniform, all ‘dropping in.’ G. and I, and Sir G. R. and Colonel U., always play at whist, and the others at a round game which is much livelier. I rather like whist, and think it will be one of the small vices of my old age.

I have been doing a quantity of drawings for the fancy sale. I wish you could buy some. There is a Mr. —— here who draws beautifully, and he is doing a picture for me of three of the fattest objects in nature—my pony, Chance, and Chance’s boy. I do not mean Chance’s own man, but his footboy, the boy who cleans his shoes and whets his razors. He was one of the skeletons whom the servants picked up in the starving districts, and, like most of those skeletons, the reaction has been frightful, and the little wretch is such an extraordinary figure, particularly seen in profile, that he makes everybody laugh. It will be a curious picture; and I never saw anything so well done as the pony.

I mentioned our fleas to you, I think, in my last letter. They are worse than ever, and bestow their liveliest attentions on W. and me. For the last three nights we have neither of us had any sleep, and the more the rooms are cleaned and worried the livelier the fleas are.

We want some new books. I am sure Mr. Wilberforce’s Life will be ‘sweet pretty reading.’ I have just re-read Mrs. Hannah More’s Life; that is a jewel of a book both for amusement and for good. I like it much better than I did the first time; and now I have taken for my morning book in bed (I always wake early) dear Madame de SevignÉ for the 117th time. It is a very affecting book amongst other merits. She was such a good, warm-hearted woman, and was not loved enough. I wish she was not dead and was here! We rather want more letters about the fashions. I am quite certain, from the unmitigated hatred I feel to the tight bit at the top of my sleeves, that you have all got rid of it, and are swaggering about in the fullest of sleeves again. Indeed, if you are not, it would be only benevolent to say you are!

Letter to J. C., Esq.

Simla, Wednesday, Aug. 22.

This is to be really a short letter, for I have sent off so many that I have not the fraction of a new idea left; but I feel it my duty to encourage you in your excellent habit of writing. The letters do not come, on account of the monsoon; but still I feel confident, from my intimate knowledge of your character, that yours is an excellent habit of writing, when the monsoon does not set itself against it.

I think it has rained incessantly since I wrote to your mother last, and most people have passed their time in mopping up the wet in their houses, but ours has behaved like an angel, and since the first day has never had a leak. The roofs here are all flat, and made of mud beat into a stiff consistency; but when the rain does get through, the drippings are of a muddy nature. Captain M., after moving into every corner of his house, used to write under an umbrella; and Captain B. and his companion Dr. S. have dined every day in their house with umbrellas held over their heads and their dinners. Still, I do not dislike the rain so much as most people do. There is often a fine half-hour before sunset, in which it is easy to take a canter, quite long enough for the exercise of the day; and whenever it is not actually pouring, the hills are perfectly beautiful and the evening skies are not amiss. Then it is always cool, and people should make much of that blessing. We had an arrival two days ago of a box of new books; that is, new to us. You may remember them in the early part of the reign of Victoria the First, but the pleasure of seeing them is very great. I have read all our old ones (and we have a great collection) at least three times over, even including the twenty-one volumes of St. Simon, which I read once on board ship and now again here; and it certainly is a wonderfully amusing book. I must have begun it again if the box had not appeared. To think of our only having yet received in this legal, direct manner, the eighteenth number of Pickwick! We finished it six months ago, because it is printed and reprinted at Calcutta from overland copies. Mais, je vous demande un peu—what should we have done, if we had waited for the lawful supply, to know Pickwick’s end? I see you are making a great fuss about copyrights, &c., which I cannot understand, as we see it only by bits and scraps; but I beg to announce that I am entirely for piracy and surreptitious and cheap editions, and an early American copy of an English novel for three rupees, instead of a late English one at twenty-two shillings. ‘Them’s my sentiments’ for the next three years at least. As it is, I am reading with deep attention ‘Lady Annabella,’ by the author of ‘Constance,’ which was, I remember, a remarkably pretty novel; and so is this, only the heroine will call her mother ‘My lady.’ I keep hoping it is a joke, and pretend to laugh every time it occurs, but it looks frightfully serious at times. Perhaps the fashion of calling one’s mother ‘My lady’ may have come in, though, since my time.

All our plans have come into shape, and rather satisfactorily. We shall not leave this till the first week in November, when the great heat of the plains will be over. We are to meet Runjeet on the 20th, or thereabouts, at Ferozepore, when also the army will be assembled under Sir G. R.

There will be a review of the army before it goes down the river; and though we talk of our interview taking only a fortnight, everybody says we shall be kept there a month. That will luckily not leave us time for a very long march, and the probability is that we shall only go to Agra, and come up here again in March.