Winter India/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
MADRAS AND CALCUTTA
HERE is a splendid show of old armor and weapons in the Madras Museum, but those trophies of metal-work are not unique like the relies and fragments from the great Buddhist shrines of the south. Room after room is filled with bas-reliefs and images dating from the noblest period of Greco-Buddhist art, the great tope of Amraoti having been, like the temple of Boro Boedor in Java, a picture-Bible of Buddhism. The exquisite marble bas-reliefs, portraying events in the life of Buddha and scenes of religious ceremony, and the bands of ornament give but a starting-point for the imagination to reconstruct the shrines of twelve and fifteen centuries ago. There are treasured relics dating centuries before the Christian era, and one bit of bone in a beryl cylinder, found in the excavations at the Bhattiprolu mound, is an undoubted fragment of the body of Gautama Buddha. Our guides were not eloquent over these Buddhist relics, knowing more about the jeweled and damascened swords, goads, spears, and daggers of the late Raja of Tanjore, whose treasures had lately come to the "wonderhouse," as the natives term a museum. A wonder-guide had attached himself to us as we made the rounds, greatly to the annoyance of Samuel Daniel, whose severest manner could not rout him. At the door each handed us an umbrella, and as we went down the steps Daniel thrust away the self-appointed guide and began: "Your ladyships"; but the rival slipped past, opened the carriage door, and, bowing, said: "Your highnesses." The constant "ladyships" that we everywhere received declared how the wily Hindu sees and plays upon the weaknesses of the alien race he knows best, and the "highnesses" was climax of the play upon snobbery.
One never could have greater need for an astral body than in Madras, where we drove and drove to get to any place—through miles of banian tunnels and green-vaulted avenues, along the Marina road by the sea, and through the Adyar suburb, where Theosophists still congregate, despite the cruel exposure of the whole Helena Blavatsky-Mahatma-Yogi frauds in that very quarter years ago.
Life is lived on narrow margins in India. One cannot get "something for nothing" in Madras; and every purchase sent to the hotel came with a footnote to the bill: "Coolie not paid." When Samuel Daniel had left for his home, the next post brought us a card: "Your ladyships: I forgetfully leave my carpet and blanket with David's bed at Guindy Bridge. Please David have send to, as railway parcel, to station-master at Trichinopoli." We ordered the room butler to send a responsible person to the station and—but before I could finish my remarks and tell how to prepay the parcel, his grins changed and he began to storm angrily: "Who pays that coolie? Who pays that railway? I am poor man. Suppose I never see Daniel again? Suppose I die, and Daniel does n't come? What becomes of my family then? You pay the coolie. You pay the coolie. God will bless you. God will bless the good lady who helps the poor. Think of my family! Oh, think of my family! You pay the coolie! You pay the coolie! God will bless you!" he implored, working himself into a very frenzy. There was a rush and rustle of starched clothing and the frenzy suddenly ended as David cuffed him out of the room with word that the memsahib had expected to pay the coolie anyhow.
The butler presented a bill that was many rupees too much. "I must see the manager about this," I said, rising to leave the room. "Oh, your ladyship! Your ladyship! Write a chit! Write only a little chit—a little chit to the manager, and he will understand and make it right," implored the end-man. "But I must see him," I said. A torrent of agitated pleas poured from the minstrel. "The manager is away. He is at the fort."
"Then I will wait and speak to him when he returns."
"But, your ladyship, suppose your ship comes! Oh, your ladyship, write just a little chit," and the butler wrung his hands in real despair.
That act of the farce having lasted long enough, I wrote "too much" on the back of the bill. The butler carried it out on the silver salver, went to a table at the end of the hall, and wrote something on the face of the bill. Pooh Bah had literally gone over to the other side of the stage and become manager himself. He returned in less than three minutes with the corrected bill, with apologies from the manager three miles away at the fort, and with his autograph "Thanks" written at the end. Then the combination butler-manager-bookkeeper took the money, went back to the hall table, and receipted the bill, which was all in the one handwriting.
All the doors of my room, the windows, the hall, staircase, and portico were full of salaaming servants when leave-taking came. The neighborhood must have been emptied for our farewell, as well as the village of servants in the back yard. From the triple-part chief to the humblest coolie, gardener, water-carrier, sweeper, and the despised woman slavey, all stood expectant, rubbing their noses upward with their palms and extending their hands as they wailed: "Prissint! Prissint! Oh, memsahib, prissint!"
"Will you kindly telephone to the hotel when the ship is sighted Sunday morning. There are eight passengers there," I had said to the clerk on Saturday. "Oh, madam," said the pink Englishman in a shocked tone, "the telephone cannot be used on Sundays. The telephone office is closed."
At sunrise and at sunset we drove to the empty harbor, and a black babu at the door of the steamship office said: "The Khedive, she will not come until morning now. She cannot get in the entrance of the breakwater without daylight."
"When will the launch go off to the ship?"
"Oh, we don't get the passengers out. You just put yourself in a massoula-boat when you see the ship and go out to it yourself."
We engaged a massoula-boat from him with the agreement that one of the crew should rouse the hotel when the Khedive was sighted. And he did, with such fervor and fury that we all drove at a Gilpin-speed for the harbor lest we miss the ship. Black boatmen ran the last mile beside us, screeching their numbers, holding out their tin license-tags, and dodging the blows of our own courier boatman, who resented any approaches toward his legal fares. We and our trunks and traps were but atoms in the bottom of the cavernous massoula-boat that the black babu had engaged for us—a primitive native boat whose timbers, fitted and tied together, only can withstand the famous Madras surf. Six black man-apes plied arrow-headed poles that passed for oars, and with a wild, resounding chant shot away from the iron pier. We clung to the high gunwales as we stood on the loose lattice of poles and mats and wondered when the first great roller would lift us. But we rowed only a few hundred yards to a ship within the still pool of the artificial harbor, sheltered by a breakwater whose opposing arms, bearing twin lighthouses, were far enough apart for fleets to have manœuvered there after dark. Madras people went past us in dingies and dories and any sort of row-boats, and we in our arks of massoula-boats were as ridiculous as tourists generally are in strange lands. Enough tourists had been duped into engaging these huge surf-boats to make a very imposing appearance when the fleet approached the gangway in line. There was a smooth, smiling sunlit sea flickering beyond the breakwater that serene December day, and the fabled surf of the Coromandel coast and the "life-in-your-hand" embarkations at Madras were other outlived illusions.
There had been a bedlam of coolies at the pier, but there was ten times more bedlam at the one gangway of the Khedive; one stream of passengers, servants, and baggage-coolies ascending the narrow, swaying gangway, and another stream trying to descend, every lung and muscle in the lot working overtime. We hesitated long, but David, scenting a fray, was as intractable as a war-horse, and, leaping ahead, screamed, pushed, kicked, and slapped a way for us through the struggling bearers, the toppling trunks and bags. The others did the same, and one would rather have jumped over than have attempted to return. As one woman was jerked up by both arms from the rocking massoula-boat, a lurch sent her against the gangway chains and knocked her chatelaine-bag off and into the water. With it went watch, purse, keys, tickets, and letter of credit. And the ship was to sail in an hour! The purser sent a boatman in haste, a lighter came alongside, and the diver was dressed, his headpiece screwed on before our eyes, and his leaden knapsack arranged as his weighted feet were lowered from rung to rung of the ladder until beneath the water. A line of bubbles showed where he walked about at the bottom of the sea, and in five minutes he came up with the bag on his wrist, the whole proceeding as orderly and matter-of-fact as if it were the usual thing to drop and recover articles in Madras harbor.
The completed railway now gives one choice of a land route to Calcutta in half the time a ship requires; but with the dust, heat, and discomfort considered, it is not always preferred.
"The Khedive, she" made the seven hundred and eighty miles from Madras to Calcutta in four days and a half, counting in the whole night that we anchored among a brilliant constellation of ships' lights at the Hugli mouth of the Ganges. When the ship started up the sacred, muddy stream of such ill omen, with a famous Hugli pilot in an enormous mushroom solar hat shading him like an umbrella, ports were closed, ropes laid out, and every officer, lascar, and stoker was at his post. The ship sailed smoothly over the shoals and quicksands of such dire record and nothing happened.
We hastened to the Great Eastern Hotel, to which we had written in November, again in December, and twice telegraphed of our coming from Madras.
"We never reserve rooms unless money is inclosed with the order," said the haughty brown clerk. "This hotel is full."
"Have you any mail for us?"
"Oh, yes. Many letters. They have Been coming for some time. The bank messenger brought many to-day. You will find them in that desk over there," pointing to a box where every one rummaged and chose at will.
We drove in the fast-falling dusk to five hotels and four boarding-houses. Not a room nor a tent could be had, and we were deciding whether to lay ourselves on an orphan asylum's door-step, seek the consul as really distressed Americans, or go back to the ship and insist upon their keeping us until morning, when the peon of one of the hotels screamed and ran after us as we drove past. We hurried in and sat on the upper backstairs until we could make an instantaneous exchange of luggage with an officer called back to his hill station. The small back room had such shabby furnishings as would cause an American cook to give notice, and we commanded a view of tin roofs, chimney-pots, and clothes-lines. A half-clad, hairy man came in with a bloated goatskin of water over his shoulder. He pulled the goatskin neck around and filled the bath-tub from the leather reservoir—this primitive method surviving in the "city of palaces" after a century of British rule and long official example of luxury and splendor.
In the dining-room each guest had his own servant standing behind his chair. One hundred guests sat at meat, and more than that many turbaned bearers stepped silently over the marble floor. Each retainer looked grim determination, and had a row of knives, forks, and spoons thrust dagger-wise in his belt. Then we discovered that the table d'hôte was the battle-ground of the bearers, that food and forks were for the forehanded, for the swiftest and strongest only. Our Tamil was quivering for the fray and soon in the midst of it, wresting soup and fish, entrée, roast, and game, trophy by trophy, and emerging from each hand-to-hand struggle with turban awry and eyes flashing. Although this football rush was going on in the pantry and dining-room, the swiftly moving, barefooted contestants made no sound on the marble floor, and only a suppressed hissing indicated the death-scuffle behind the screen. Each bearer put down the hard-won plate before his master, pulled a fresh knife and fork from his belt, gave them a rub on his voluminous garments, and fell into statuesque pose again behind the chair.