Dharwar

Dharwar Station is not so unlike one we know within two and a half miles of the centre of Scotland. It is almost the same size but there is no village. Though not imposing, I understand it is the nerve centre of some 1,500 miles of The Southern Maharatta Railway.

As we pull up my brother, Colonel and Agent on the platform, remarks, "Well, here you are, you're looking well—have you any luggage?" and in a twinkling we are driving away, leaving the "little pick" of luggage to the boy to bring up leisurely. G.'s maid drives off in a princely padded ox cart or dumbie, and we get into a new modern victoria. I am not sure which is the most distinguished, perhaps the dumbie; it is at any rate more Oriental, and its bright red and blue linings, white hood, and two thoroughbred white oxen make a very gay turn-out.

The Agent's bungalow is wide-spreading, flat-roofed, with deep verandah supported on white-washed classic pillars, and surrounded by a park. There are borders of blooming chrysanthemums and China asters, and trees with quaint foliage, and flowering creepers about the house. The flower borders seem to tail away into dry grass and bushes and trees of the park, and that changes imperceptibly into dry rolling country with scattered trees and bushes.

Lunch is served by waiters in white clothes and bare feet, "velvet footed waiters" to be conventional, and there is a blessed peace and quietness about our new surroundings. For weeks past we have ever heard our fellows' voices all the day long; what a contrast is this quiet and elbow room to the crowd on the P. & O. and the gun firing and babel of Bombay.

… It is overcast and still; away to the east over the rolling bushy country are heavy showers, but at this spot trees and crops faint for water. We doze in the verandah and wake and doze again, and wonder how this silence—can be real, even the birds seem subdued. We notice E.H.A.'s friends are here in numbers, Mina birds, the Seven Sisters, King Crows, and one of his (E.H.A.'s) enemies comes in as I write, a yellow-eyed frog; he hops in on the matting and looks and looks—I like the unfathomable philosophy in its golden eye. And my brother stops reading Indian politics and calls me outside to see a Horn Bill—all beak, and little head or body to speak of, he sways on a leafless tree and scraiks anxiously for his friends; they are generally in companies of three or four. A little later, as I write beside a reading lamp in G.'s room, a lizard takes a position on the window, and out of the outer darkness comes a moth and lights on to the outside of the pane, and the lizard pecks at it—neither the moth nor the lizard understand glass—peck, peck, every now and then—trying to get through to the moth—how delightfully human—the perpetual endeavour to get Beyond, without the will or power to see the infinite reflections of the Inside.

As we speculate to-night as to where some of our neighbours on the "Egypt" may have got to by this time, the post comes in with letters from this one and the other. One is from Mrs Deputy-Commissioner. A few days ago we were altogether in Bombay, melting in the heat, and now we are towards the south of this Peninsula, and she writes from its farthest north: we are in a hot parched country, whilst she and the D.-C. are in camp, sitting over a huge fire of logs in a pine forest. She writes, "To-morrow we enter a valley where five bears have recently been seen and pheasants abound," and the day after "we shall be at the top of the pass, 9,000 feet. Rosy snows and golden mists far below us melt into purple depths." … So this day's journal closes with pleasant thoughts of relatives and pleasant friends in many distant parts of this wide land.

… Sunday.—We arrived here on Friday—the silence is almost oppressive. Great grey clouds roll up from the east all day till evening, when they form solid bluish ranks; each cloud threatens rain which never falls. The stillness in the bungalow is only broken by the occasional cheep, cheep, cheep of the house lizard, a tiny little fellow that lives behind picture frames and in unused jugs and corners. His body is only about an inch and a half long, but his clear voice fills the large rooms and emphasies the silence. Outside it is as quiet; there is the chink—chink of the copper-smith bird, like a drop of water at regular intervals into a metal bowl.

The Colonel and G. rode at 8 A.M., and I biked. It is not such interesting country here as what we came through in the train—rolling, stoney, with friable red soil, and hard to ride on. Many dusty roads meet at all angles; along these you meet herds of buffalo and cows driven leisurely by boys or men. Some cows, of errant natures, have logs dangling by a rope from their necks amongst their feet; they can't go off very fast or far with the encumbrance. They stir up the dust as they go along, and it falls and lies on the children till their dark skins have a bloom like sloe-berries. There are all sorts of birds to look at—kites, crows, vultures, hawks, eagles; with these you can't expect to see game birds, though it looks an ideal country, though perhaps a little waterless, for pheasants and partridges. When I stop I see the side of the road swarms with insect life, ants of various, kinds, black and red, small and big, pegging along the level, and up and down trees, as if the world depended on each individual's particular bustling. There are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate—very hard and strong. I don't know what they are built for—I must consider the matter like the sluggard some day, if I have time, or read about them if that is not a bigger order. What strikes you at first about the white ant is that you never see it unless you lay its works open. His hard-sun-baked protections run up the tree stems or wherever he goes and conceals and protects his soft, white, fleshy body, and if you prise this casing open you may see him getting away as fast as his little legs will take him; really he is a termite you know, like a "wood louse or worm," and not an ant. A wonder of the world is how he gets the liquid secretion to fasten the grains of sand together to make his earthen tunnels. If he goes to the top of a house to remove furniture or the like, he builds his tunnel all the way up; and in a thirsty land the top storey of a sun-bitten house does not seem the place to get water: but I must leave this subject to the disquisitions of men of more leisure and greater abilities, and proceed to make some observations on, and jottings of, the figures on the road. Here are women bringing up great round earthenware vases on their heads and little round brass bowls in their hands, going and coming from a muddy pool in the centre of a waste of dried mud. They go slowly, the walking is rough for bare feet, for the clay is hard and baked and pitted with cows' feet marks. They drink and wash their bowls in the dregs in the pond, the water already so dirty that a self-respecting duck would not swim in it, and wade about stirring up the mud, then fill their bowls and march away with it for domestic uses—this sounds bad, but it looks a great deal worse. The figures though are charming, with balanced bowl on head, and draperies blown into such folds as a Greek would have loved to model … But their faces!—Phew! when you see them closely, are frightful!

It is difficult to catch their movement; they are so restless. All people who wear loose draperies seem to be so; witness Spanish women, and the Spanish type of women in our Highlands and Ireland, how they keep constantly shifting their shawls.

… The Club in evening—a tiny club, quite nice after a quiet day in the bungalow. I was introduced to the five men there, who put me through my paces very gently; I just passed I think, and no more. "Play bridge?—No. Billiards?—Not much." I began to feel anxious and feared they'd try cricket. "Tennis?—Yes, dote on tennis!" That smoothed things, and then we got on to shooting, and all went off at a canter. One of my inquisitors, Mr Huddleston, had been in Lumsden's Horse (the Indian contingent in S. Africa), and said he had helped a young brother of mine out of action at Thaban' Chu.[11] Lumsden's Horse got left there and lost heavily. I knew this brother had been ridden off the stricken field on Captain P. Chamney's back under heavy fire, one of these V.C. doings that were discounted in S. Africa, and knew that two other fellows rode on either side to steady the sanguinary burden. So here was one of the two, and I asked who the other was, and he said, "Trooper Ducat, but Powell mended your brother's head; didn't you meet him in the Taj Hotel in Bombay?" And I laughed, for I remembered the doctor of the Taj, a rather retiring man, who generally sat alone at a table in the middle of the great dining-room; and that whenever he had friends dining with him, and I looked up, I was safe to find either he or his friends looking across in my direction, why I couldn't make out. Now it was explained! He remembered mending a man's forehead that had been broken by a piece of shell, and concluded from the surname in the Hotel Book, and possibly family likeness, that I was the man, and naturally he would say to his friends, "Look you at that man over there—wouldn't think he had lost half his head with a pom-pom shell would you? but he did, and I mended it!—It's pretty well done, isn't it? You can hardly see a mark."

… Then evening service in a tiny church, a quiet, monotonous, gently murmured lesson, and a few verses from the Old Testament about sanguinary battles long ago and exemplary Hebrew warriors—how soothing! Doors and windows are wide open, and moths fly in and round the lamps from the blue night outside. The air is full of the rattle of the cicada, which is like the sound of a loud cricket, or the 'r—r' of a corncraik's note going on for ever and ever; and the house lizard in the church goes cheep—cheep—cheep every now and then. No one pays any attention to its loud sweet note. Rather pretty Eurasian girls play the organ and sing, and look through their fingers as they pray.

Then we are dismissed, and find ourselves out in the dark, and the longed for rain falling very lightly. The white dressed native servants are there with lamps and bring up the bullock carts, and ladies go off in them with the harness bells aringing. We have "The Victoria" of the station—and faith, barring the exercise, I'd as soon not walk! Did not Mr H. kill a great Russell viper at the club steps last night, and was not bitten, and so is alive to tell the tale to-day and to-morrow, and to show the skin, three feet long with a chain pattern down the back; the beast!—it won't get out of your path; lies to be trodden on, then turns and bites you, and you're dead in three minutes by the clock.

… To-day, Tuesday—could read a little—temperature down. Found it an entertainment listening to the voices of various callers in the centre hall of the bungalow, of which one half forms the drawing-room, the other half the dining-room. The bedroom doors open into this, and these doors are a foot off the ground, and fail to meet the top of the arches above them by about other two feet. The advantage of this I fail to see, further than that a convalescent or any other person who can't be bothered talking, can if he pleases, listen to others conversing; if, however, he prefers to sleep, he can't!

I got a glimpse of the gaily dressed callers through the transparent purdahs that separate my room on the outside from the verandah. They drove in white dumbies with white bullocks; the carts and harness glistened with vermilion, sky blue, and gold details; the driver, black of course, in livery, with a boy carrying a white yak's tail in black-buck's horn to brush away flies. I was sorry to miss seeing these kind people, but hope to get over the effect of sun, plus cold baths, and return their calls, and so increase my stock of first impressions of Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and subjective." Crushing to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his victim, the M.P., "is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this ludicrous old Shrovetide cock, whose ignorance and information leave two broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading public." This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit at Burns, the "incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for verse"—a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to say in the "Contemporary Review."

"I became acquainted in a few weeks with what the majority of our civilian officers spend their lives in only half suspecting. My experience has been that of a tourist, but I have returned satisfied that it is quite possible to see, hear, and understand all that vitally concerns our rule in India in six months' time."

After all, who may write about India? Major Jones said to me the other day, "Why on earth is Smith writing about India—what does he know? he is just out; why! I've been here over ten years and have just learned I know nothing."

Then I said, "What about General Sir A. B. Blank's writings?" Blank is going home after about forty years in India. "Oh! good gracious," he said, "Blank's ideas are hopeless—utterly antiquated!" Therefore no one may write about India; Smith is too inexperienced, Jones has only learned he knows nothing, and General Blank is too antiquated.

This day we spent calling round the station. The owners of the two first bungalows were out; at the third the hostess carried wreaths of flowers, which she was on her way to place on her native butler's grave; he had died of plague. The next house was full of madonnas and maids worshipping the latest arrival in the station, a chubby boy of six months. The father had retired to a quiet corner, but seeing another mere man, he came out with certain alacrity and suggested a peg and cheroot. The next house was the doctor's, and the Mrs Doctor and I were just getting warm over Ireland, and had got to Athlone, Galway, and Connemara, when the ten minutes, that seem law here, were up, and G. rose to go, and I'd to leave recollections of potheen, and wet, and peat reek, and "green beyond green"—such refreshing things even to think of in this Eastern land, especially for us who are on the wander and know we will be home soon. But it must be a different feeling for those people at their posts, tied down by duty, year after year, with the considerable chance of staying in the little bit of a cemetery with others who failed to get home. But we must not touch on this aspect of our peoples life out here, it is too deeply pathetic. At the next house I did actually get a peg, and it was a pleasing change after buffalo milk and quinine for days: and mine host, who had been on the "West Coast," told me his experience of pegs in Africa. "The men," he said, "who didn't take pegs there at all, all died for certain, and men who took nips and pegs in excess died too; a few, however, who took them in moderation survived."

Then we drove towards the sunset and rolling hills, and were overwhelmed with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could remember it exactly. One figure I can still see—there is an open space, green grass, and Corot like trees on either side reflected in water, and a girl carrying a black water-pot on her head, crosses the grass in the rays of the setting sun—a splash of transparent rosy draperies round a slight brown figure.

Friday.—Rode in morning with the Brother, painted and drove with G. in the afternoon, tennis and badminton at club, and people to dinner; that is not such a bad programme, is it? Not exciting, but healthy, bar the excessive number of meals between events,[12] and tiresome in regard to the inevitable number of changes of clothes. The ride we start after an early cup of tea. It begins pleasantly cool, but in an hour you feel the sun hot, and are glad to get in and change to dry clothes, and have breakfast proper about 9 A.M. The Brother then goes to office, which is a building like an extensive hydropathic, on an eminence to which on various roads, at certain hours of the day, streams of tidy native clerks may be seen going and coming. Of what they do when they get there, or where they go when they leave I have no idea; the country all round seems just red, rolling, gritty soil, with thorny bushes and scattered trees! But there is a native town; possibly these men go there, though their costumes are too trim to suggest native quarters.

There is such silence up here on the tableland at mid-day—only a light soughing of the soft, hot wind, otherwise not even the cheep of a lizard. A little later in the afternoon begins the note of a bird, like a regular drop of water into a metal pot, very soft and liquid, and when the gardener waters the flowers, more birds come round to drink. The house too is absolutely still; the servants drowse in their quarters in the compound; G. and her maid in a back room are quiet as mice; they got a sewing machine, which was a very clever thing to do, but it was a tartar, it wouldn't work—that was "Indian" I expect—so they have had a most happy morning pulling it to bits, and putting it together again—I wonder if they will make it go.

[12] Specially laid on for our benefit.