Letters from India Volume II/From the Hon F H Eden to a Friend 4
, –There are no ships going, so it is a perfect farce to begin a letter to you; and a great English ship which was reported at the mouth of the river a week ago, everybody says in a melancholy tone, has got into the eastern channel, as if in this part of the world it could get into any other channel. Never- theless, the grand result is its total disappear- ance. I dare say it is dead of the cholera.
However, we are doing—I may almost say we have done—our grief for the King, and are stamping rupees with Victoria’s head on them. That is a great national measure on the occasion, and I heard the mint man acutely remark, ‘Now I wish we had never changed the stamp; I should not wonder if the natives were to mistrust a coin with nothing but a woman's head on it.’ We should naturally be living under William IV. if the last overland despatch had not reached us in less than two months, and that makes us very precocious in our English knowledge.
We are on the brink of going up the country. We expect to set off about this day five weeks, and B is doing what may be called pulling our chairs from under us in the most ruthless manner. Horses, carriages, servants, howdahs, all our small comforts, are to be sent on to-morrow to Benares, where, I believe, our camp is to be formed; for, as we are to be towed there by a steamer, they will be some weeks longer going. I don’t think you have been here for the last two or three days, and you might as well have come this morning. I have found it utterly impossible to settle to anything, even to write this letter.
The servants have all got their state livery given them to-day; an immense amount is expended on scarlet and gold to show our sense and grandeur to the natives up the country. I had just begun to write, when I heard a great movement on the staircase leading to my rooms, and then the old khansamah walked in with a considerable body of followers. He has lived here for fifty years, and is a fine old man, with a long white beard, and rules us all. He was in a transport of vanity with his dress, which is perfectly beautiful, both turban and tunic. He talks English, and did the honours of himself in this way: ‘I come with my kitmutgars and chowkeydars to make salaam to Ladysheep. My dress very beautiful; I got gold lace here and there, and have a crown and stars on shoulders, which nobody else has. Chowkeydars one row gold lace more than kitmutgars, but all less than me.’ I expressed my profound admiration, and then they all beat their foreheads and walked out. Ten minutes after there was another movement, and the nazir, who is George’s head man, walked in with his twenty hurkarus, who answer to our footmen. He reads and writes English, and admired himself in the most polished language. ‘I doing my best to keep up with him,’ and then he and all his followers salaamed. Then Emily’s and my jemadars, with our hurkarus; Ariff was excessively grand indeed. Then came the sirdar with all his followers, the men who carry the palankeens and pull our punkahs; then the musalchees, who have the charge of lighting the house, and so on to five processions more, classes of people whose existence I had never heard of, all equally proud of their appearance. Last came the most degraded caste of all, the mihturs, or people who sweep out the rooms. None of the other servants would take anything from their hands, and, in compliment to that feeling, they all had different dresses of dark purple. This shocked me, so I made a point of admiring these dresses, more particularly as their head man, as if in mockery of himself, brought in Chance wearing a little gold coat. No high caste servant will touch a dog.
I am in a shocking way about Gazelle. He has become more attractive and more exclusively attached than ever; but he has grown enormously, too large for anyone to carry, even if he did not in the most shocking manner kick any servant who ventures to come near him, and, as he will follow no one but me, I cannot imagine how his march of some thousand miles is to be accomplished. B has forsaken me in my utmost need, shaking his head ominously and saying that Gazelle will certainly die during the first week. That lowers B in my eyes; I did think he would have offered him half his palankeen.
If you want a diamond three quarters of an inch in diameter tell me. W has just brought me a ring to look at, with a single diamond of that size; and, because it has an imperceptible flaw in it, the jewellers say it is only worth 1,600l. I offered them your 20l. for it, but they would not take it. I have begged to have sentinels placed over me and it till it is fetched back again.
Dr. Drummond says that a few days ago his friend Dr. G found an adjutant which was so heavy it could not fly. In their horrid surgical way they killed it, and, on opening it, they found it had swallowed a baby. In the most dawdling way these birds manage to suck down live cats, rats, and crows without any apparent effort; but to swallow a body is rather strange. In some countries the bird would have been tried for murder; here nobody but a doctor would dare to kill one.