Letters from India Volume I/To the Countess of Buckinghamshire 6
My dearest Sister,—Do you think, hot and weary as I am, I could run off all at once a letter to you to go off per ‘Bolton,’ which sails early to-morrow? I do not much care if I cannot, because she is to stop at Madras and the Cape, very much as if the post to East Combe went round by Battersea and Langley as far as time is concerned; so any other ship would do better, only it is a long time since I have written to you and I feel uncomfortable about it. I had meant to write to you as I did to on the anniversary of our arrival here, only I knew you would not believe it was only a year; it is ten, is not it? You are a sort of person who keeps accounts and are exact and know how time really goes.
To add to the provocation of being a whole year in such a concern the old stagers all accost me with a benevolent smile and an air of patronising fellowship. ‘Well, I give you joy; now you are out of your griffinage you know as much as we do.’ ‘I should be sorry to know as little, but I suppose I shall if I stay here four years more,’ is my natural response. But I only think these things; I don’t say them. I keep silence—yea, even from good words—but you will allow there is ample provocation for bad ones. I am thinking of being extravagantly original the next few weeks, just to show them that even habit cannot bring me to their dull level.
I forwarded to you last week a great packet of Fanny’s, which will show you how she is enjoying her travels. I hear from her or most days, and they seem to be enjoying themselves much, though disappointed with the number of their tigers. They have killed none the last week. Our doctor has been very ill for a few days with a regular Bengal fever, but he is quite out of all danger to-day, and the disorder is at an end. Indeed, I do not know that he ever was in danger; the two physicians who were attending him said not, but that it was one of those cases which required great care, and they were here every two or three hours, and put leeches on twice in one day.
I had such a bad night last night—the sort of bad nights that can only be grown in this country, so complete and from such odd causes. I have changed the order of my rooms, and in moving my mosquito-house from my former bedroom, now my sitting-room, it got warped and the doors would not shut close; so the mosquitoes, who never miss their opportunity, whisked in forthwith, and the more I drove them about with the chowry the more they buzzed, till, with them and the weather, I was in a fever; and just at the hottest a regular northeaster set in—a sort of hurricane. All my windows and shutters were wide open, and I heard all the curiosities in my room flying about as if they were mere rubbish, and when I tried to get out I found Rosina had bolted the door of my mosquito-house outside. Such a position! A storm destroying my little property outside and those insects raging within, and the more I called to Wright, and Rosina, and Anna, and all the ‘Qui Hi’s’ in the passage the more they slept. However, they woke at last, and the shutters were shut and order restored, and I thought I might go to sleep; not that one ever can in this country if the night begins ill, so of course some of the bearers, who sleep in the verandah below, began to cough out of compliment to the storm, and some English chickens Wright has set up began to crow, and the heat was worse than ever when the hurricane went by; and at last I told them to pull the punkah in my bed, not knowing that having once begun it never can be left off again for the next eight months. Altogether I slept for one hour. And now you know what an Indian bad night is. The result was that after luncheon I thought I would go to sleep, and took off my frill and my sash and let all the hooks and eyes loose, and told the servants to keep the passage quiet and not to come in with any notes; and just as I had sunk into a peaceable slumber several of them rushed in, announcing the Lord Sahib himself and the Lord Padre; and then came George, looking very fussy and as if he knew he did not go twice a day to church, or that there was ever any dancing in Government House, and then the Bishop and his chaplains and the Archdeacon; and I was not half awake, and Chance began to bark, and a little motherless mouse-deer I am bringing up by hand was asleep on the sofa. In short we never were less prepared for a dignitary who thinks much of ceremonies. However, I did my best—shook myself straight, gave Chance a gentle kick, tried to give ‘La Fleur des Pois,’ by Balzac, a botanical air, sat carelessly down on the mouse-deer, and conversed with considerable freedom, slightly checked by artful attempts to fish out from under the Bishop’s chair my sash with the buckle attached, which had assumed a serpentine attitude of much grace in full sight. ‘Je suis une figure affreuse, j’en suis sûre,’ I thought to myself with a pang of remembrance of your voice. But the Bishop was much too full of his own sufferings to mind it. He had been twenty days in a steamer coming down from Allahabad and was nearly baked, and he drove straight to Government House on landing. I never saw anybody so done up. He has been up the country ever since we arrived. We hear he is very amusing; he always says something very odd in his sermons, particularly if he sees his hearers inattentive. Several people have told me that they heard him say in the cathedral, ‘You won’t come to church. Some of you say it is too hot; to be sure it is hot,’ and then he wiped his face; ‘I myself feel like a boiled cabbage, but here I am, preaching away.’ There was a sort of service here in this house when the W. Bentincks went away, and in praying against the perils of the deep he quite forgot he was praying and began describing his own sufferings. ‘When I ran up from Singapore to Ceylon I never felt anything like it; the ship rolled here and there; I was so giddy I was obliged to hold on by the table.’ I mean to go on Friday night to the cathedral to hear his first sermon—a funeral sermon on the late Bishop Corrie.
We have set up a second late drive after dinner since last week when there has been a moon. After eight there is not a human being to be seen on the plain, either native or European, and between nine and ten most of the latter are in bed and asleep. However, it has been discovered that we went out at that undue hour, and on Thursday morning half the ladies that came, began wondering at it and asked what made me think of it. I said it must have been inspiration; I could not trace any train of events which could have led to such an original idea, but it had been done before at home, and perhaps the moon and the idle horses, &c. &c. They still thought it odd and not the usual way of Calcutta, but, if it really were pleasant, they thought they would try too the next moon. I thought that mean of them, so I observed, ‘Oh! the moon! yes, that does very well, but I rather like the mussatchees better.’ There are always twelve mussatchees, or torch-bearers, who run before the Governor-General’s carriage at night, so that quite settled the question. It showed that it was not purely an English idea, but a highly refined Indian bit of finery borrowed from Lord Wellesley’s time at least; so they wondered still more, and now they are all going to do the same.
I wish my letters were not so tiresome, but I am hopeless about it till we begin to travel.
God bless you, my very dear, sister! George’s love; he is quite well, and so am I. I have certainly very good health in this country.