Ireland had changed since the emancipation of the Catholics. It was not with tea that the heroes of Charles Lever's time beguiled the tedium of existence.
"This dismal life," continues our heroine, "weighed on me to such an extent that I should assuredly have done something desperate if my husband had not just then been ordered to return to India." Lola, it will have been seen, entertained little affection for her na-tive land. She had no recollection of her childhood there, and she never afterwards thought of the country except in connection with the detested husband of her youth.
In the second year of the Queen's reign she left Ireland, to return years after in very different circumstances. Her fondest memories were of the East, towards which she now gladly turned her face for the second time. "On the old trail, on the out trail," she sailed aboard the East Indiaman, Blunt, her husband at her side. There is a curious parallelism between her mother's life and her own up till now, which she could[Pg 19] not have failed to notice. Her memories of the voyage strike me rather as having been specially spiced for the consumption of Parisian readers, than as an authentic relation. James, we are told, neglected his young wife, and exhibited an amazing capacity for absorbing porter. Finding the time heavy on her hands, Lola resorted to the commonest of all distractions on passenger ships--flirting. While her consort lay sleeping "like a boa-constrictor" in his bunk, his wife's admirers used to slip notes under the door, these serving her as spills for Mr. James's pipe. The gentlemen who fell under the spell of Lola's fascinations at this stage of her career were three in number--a Spaniard called Enriquez, an Englishman, simply described as John, and the skipper himself. This "colossal sailor" seems to have been somewhat of a philosopher. One of his profound reflections has been handed down to us, and is worth recording: "Love is a pipe we fill at eighteen, and smoke till forty; and we rake the ashes till our exit."
Lola thus pictures as a man-enslaving Circe the girl who was described by a contemporary as a good little thing, merry and unaffected. I doubt if the flirtations here magnified into intrigues were very serious affairs, after all. It is rather pathetic, the woman's shame for the simplicity of the girl, and her evident desire to paint her redder than she was. It is probable that the girl would have been quite as much ashamed if she could have seen herself at thirty.
[Pg 20]
[Pg 21]
IV
INDIA SEVENTY YEARS AGO
The land to which little Mrs. James was eager to return seems to us now to have been a poor exchange for the rollicking Ireland
of Lever's day. India in 1838, as for a score of years after, was under the rule of John Company. Collectors and writers of the Jos. Sedley type were still able to shake the pagoda tree, and Englishmen in outlying provinces often became suddenly rich, how or why nobody asked, and only the natives cared. Indigo planters beat their half-caste wives to death, and English magistrates looked the other way. Our people died, like flies in autumn, of cholera, snakebites, and the thousand and one fevers to which India was subject. We were still shut in by powerful native states. Ranjit Singh ruled in the Punjaub, the Baluchis in Scinde; there was yet a king in Oude and a rajah at Nagpur. Slavery was only abolished in the British dominions that very year, and Hindoo widows had but lately lost the privilege of burning themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres. The chronic famine had assumed slightly more serious proportions.
It was a land of loneliness, remote and isolated. A postal service had been introduced only the year before, and letters took at least three months to come from[Pg 22] England. This was by the overland route, which was liable at any moment to interruption by the caprice of the Pasha of Egypt or the enterprise of Bedouins. There were, of course, no railways and no telegraphs. You travelled wherever possible by river, in boats called budgerows, which had not increased in speed since Ensign Gilbert's day. Going up the Ganges you might have seen the Danish flag waving over Serampore. If you were in a hurry and could afford it, you travelled dak-- that is, in a palanquin, carried by four bearers, who were changed at each stage like posting-horses. This method of travel--about
the most uncomfortable, I conceive, ever devised by man--greatly impressed and interested Lola. She thought it repugnant to one's sense of humanity, but could not help observing the lightheartedness of the bearers. They jogged briskly along to the accompani-
9
ment of improvised songs, which were not always flattering to their human load.
"I will give you a sample," says our traveller, "as well as it could be made out, of what I heard them sing while carrying an English clergyman who could not have weighed less than two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Each line of the following jargon was sung in a different voice:--
"'Oh, what a heavy bag! No, it is an elephant;
He is an awful weight.
Let us throw his palki down, Let us set him in the mud-- Let us leave him to his fate. Ay, but he will beat us then With a thick stick.
Then let's make haste and get along, Jump along quickly!'
[Pg 23]"And off they started in a jog-trot, which must have shaken every bone in his reverence's body, keeping chorus all the time of
'Jump along quickly,' until they were obliged to stop for laughing.
"They invariably (continues Lola) suit these extempore chants to the weight and character of their burden. I remember to have been exceedingly amused one day at the merry chant of my human horses as they started off on the run.
"'She's not heavy, Cabbada [take care]! Little baba [missie], Cabbada!
Carry her swiftly,
Cabbada! Pretty baba, Cabbada!'
"And so they went on, singing and extemporising for the whole hour and a half 's journey. It is quite a common custom to give them four annas (or English sixpence) apiece at the end of every stage, when fresh horses [sic] are put under the burden; but a gentleman of my acquaintance, who had been carried too slowly, as he thought, only gave them two annas apiece. The consequence was that during the next stage the men not only went faster, but they made him laugh with their characteristic song, the whole burden of which was: 'He has only given them two annas, because they went slowly; let us make haste, and get along quickly, and then we shall get eight annas, and have a good supper.'"
The burden of the European's life in India at this period is voiced in "Marois'" poem, The Long, Long,[Pg 24] Indian Day. It was the empire of ennui. A strongly puritanical tone, too, was observable in certain influential circles, and the clergy frequently discountenanced and condemned the poor efforts at relaxation made by officers and their wives. Dances and amateur theatricals were often the subject of censure from the pulpit. So the men fell back on brandy pawnee, loo, and tiger-shooting. The women were worse
off. To the Honourable Emily Eden we are indebted for some vivid pictures of Anglo-Indian society during the viceroyalty of her brother, Lord Auckland (1836-1842). They enable us to realise Lola's emotions and manner of life during her second visit to India. Miss Eden's compassionate interest was excited by
"a number of young ladies just come out by the last ships, looking so fresh and English, and longing to amuse themselves--and it must be such a bore at that age to be shut up for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four; and the one hour that they are out is only an airing just where the roads are watered. They have no gardens, no villages, no poor people, no schools, no poultry to look after--none of the occupations of young people. Very few of them are at ease with their parents; and, in short, it is a melancholy sight to see a new young arrival."
Another passage runs:--
"It is a melancholy country for wives at the best, and I strongly advise you never to let young girls marry an East Indian. There was a pretty Mrs. ---- dining here yesterday, quite a child in looks, who married just before the Repulse sailed, and landed here about ten
10
days ago. She goes on next week to Neemuch, a place at the farthest extremity of India, where there[Pg 25] is not another European woman, and great part of the road to it is through jungle, which is only passable occasionally from its unwholesomeness. She detests what she has