CHAPTER IV
I HAVE been obliged to give up the five last days to other letters, to the manifest disadvantage of my Journal, your unspeakable loss, and my own deep regret; but what can be done? It is just possible to do all we have to do – just not impossible to write it down once, but quite impossible either to live, or to write it over again; and I have had a large packet of very old English letters since we came here, which set me off answering them.
The résumé of our proceedings, since I sent off my Journal to you last Thursday, Nov. 16, is shortly and longly this: – Friday, we went a large party to the town in carriages; when the streets grew too narrow for carriages, we got on elephants; when the elephants stuck fast, we tried tonjauns; and, when the streets contracted still further, we walked; and at last, I suppose, they came to a point, for we came back. We saw some beautiful old temples, and altogether it was a curious sight. Prout would go mad in a brown outline frenzy on the spot – the buildings are so very beautiful for his style. I forgot to mention that at half-past six on Friday morning we went to a review on horseback. Saturday, we again got up at six, and F. and I went in the open carriage to sketch a tempting mosque. At eleven we received many more visitors than the tent would hold – the aides-de-camp could hardly come in with them.
G. held a durbar in the afternoon, at which seventy of the native nobility appeared. The Rajah of Benares came with a very magnificent surwarree of elephants and camels. He is immensely rich, and has succeeded an uncle who adopted him, to the great discomfiture of his father, who goes about with him in the capacity of a discontented subject. We had thirty-six people at dinner. Sunday, we went to church, and underwent the worst reading and preaching I ever heard from Mr. – , who in general preaches to his clerk; but this time the church was very full, and the congregation were all hoping to hear a little something that might do them good from our dear Y. In the afternoon G. and I went out on an elephant, and, in an attempt to make a quiet and rural cut home, nearly drowned one of our outriding camels and his rider; so we came home, much ashamed of ourselves, by the common dusty road. Monday, we got up early, and set off at seven, to pay a visit to the old Delhi Begum. The particulars I narrated with wonderful accuracy, bordering on tediousness, to M., and I am confident you would not wish me to repeat them.
G. positively declared against any more dust or any more drives, so we stuck to the tents in the afternoon. He cannot endure his tent, or the camp life altogether, and it certainly is very much opposed to all his habits of business and regularity.
On Monday evening we went to the ball again, given to us by the station. They have a theatre here, and had boarded over the pit, and by leaving some forest scenery standing on the stage, with our band playing from under the pasteboard trees, they made out a very pretty ball-room, much the best we have seen in ‘the Mofussil,’ and there were plenty of ladies, old and young, who seemed to be very glad of a dance. We got home at one.
There! W. has heard that Mr. G. has proposed. I am so glad; for Miss H. has left in England everybody that cared for her. I know that she has long liked Mr. G. I feel, too, that it is a triumph for our camp that at our very first station we should have married off our only young lady.
Yesterday we had a grand expedition, which I am going to give you and the children, once for all, at great length, and then you will for the future take it for granted that all native fêtes are much alike.
The Rajah of Benares asked us to come to his country-house, called Ramnuggur (how it is spelt, I cannot say; probably with none of those letters). It is on the other side of the Ganges. We drove down to the river-side through a dense cloud of dust. I asked one of our servants to dust me gently with my pocket-handkerchief, and without any exaggeration a thick cloud came out of my cape.
Mrs. C.’s black bonnet was of a light brown colour.
We found the rajah’s boats waiting for us – a silver armchair and footstool for his lordship in the prow, which was decorated with silvered peacocks, and a sort of red embroidered tent for ‘his women,’ where we placed ourselves, though there was another boat with two inferior silver chairs for F. and me. All these things are grandly imagined, but with the silver chairs there are boatmen in dirty liveries or no liveries at all! – and it is all discrepant, or generally so.
This rajah is immensely rich; he had a great many handsome things. I enclose a sketch to illustrate for the children ‘their dear devoted creature,’ G., first in the silver tonjaun which took him down to the boat, then in the other State silver tonjaun that took him up from the ghaut, and then a back view of him on his elephant. I often wonder whether it really can be G., the original simple, quiet one. He does it very well, but detests great part of the ceremonies, particularly embracing the rajahs!
The rajah met us at the ghaut, and we were all carried off to the elephants, and got on them to go and see his garden, though it was nearly dusk. But the first sight was very striking.
Eighteen elephants and crowds of attendants, and then crowds as far as we could see of natives, going on ‘Wah! wah! Hi Lord Sahib.’ We rode about till it was quite dark, and then the rajah proposed we should return; and when we came to the turn of the road, the whole of the village and his castle, which is an enormous building, was illuminated. Wherever there was a straight line, or a window, or an arch, there was a row of little bright lamps; every cross of the lattices in every window had its little lamp. It was the largest illumination I ever saw. We went on the elephants through the great gateway, in a Timour the Tartar fashion, into the court. Such torches and spearmen and drums and crowds, like a melodrama magnified by a solar microscope; it was the sort of scene where Ellen Tree would have snatched up a doll from under Farley’s sword, and said, ‘My boy, my boy, my rescued Agib!’ or words to that effect, while the curtain fell slowly. We got off at the door of an immense hall, a sort of court, and the rajah’s servants spread a path of scarlet and gold kincob from the door to the seat at the farthest end, for us to walk on. Considering that it is a pound a yard, and that I have been bargaining for a week for enough for a wadded douillette and was beat out of it, it was a pity to trample on it, and it led to a catastrophe, as you will see if you read on. The rajah put us three on a velvet sofa, with a gold gauze carpet before it. He sat on one side of us and his father on the other, and Mr. B. and Mr. C. on each side to interpret, and then the aides-de-camp and the other ladies; and then the nautch-girls began dancing. He had provided an immense troop of them, and they were covered with jewels and dressed in gold brocades, some purple and some red, with long floating scarfs of gold gauze. Most of them ugly, but one was I think the prettiest creature I ever saw, and the most graceful. If I have time I will send a little coloured sketch of her, just to show the effect of her dress. She and another girl danced slowly round with their full draperies floating round them, without stopping, for a quarter of an hour, during all which time they were making flowers out of some coloured scarfs they wore, and when they had finished a bunch they came and presented it to us with such graceful Eastern genuflexions. The whole thing was like a dream, it was so curious and unnatural. Then the Ranee sent for us, and F. and I set off in tonjauns for the women’s apartments, with the ladies who were with us. They carried us through a great many courts, and then the rajah gave me his cold, flabby little hand, and handed us up some narrow, dirty stairs, and came in with us behind the purdah and introduced us to the Ranee his mother, who was very splendidly dressed, and to some of his sisters, who were ugly.