India Under Ripon: A Private Diary. Blunt Wilfrid Scawen
had employed converted coolies, but found them far worse than the others; they used sometimes to go away all together and drink for a week at a time. Nobody became a Christian except for some underhand object, and as soon as he had got it he went back; he considered drinking part of the conversion. He mentioned how an Englishman of his district had been condemned to a year’s imprisonment for manslaughter on false evidence, as the man he had injured had not died – though the Englishman beat him. They asked me what the English Government meant to do, what their idea was in upsetting things? I said I believed it was merely a question of economy; the Indian Government as it was did not pay its expenses; it was like sending away an expensive Scotch gardener from a poor garden; the country would be worse administered perhaps. I consoled Mr. Y., however, by assuring him that the people now in office, Lord Kimberley, Lord Northbrook, and Lord Granville, were as little likely to do anything really in the direction of freeing the Indians as any three Tories in the kingdom. In answer to a question, the tea-planter said: ‘Of course it is impossible to get on without being bullies now and then, but it is a good rule never to touch the natives unless you mean it in earnest. If you strike a nigger and he thinks you are afraid to hit him hard, he runs you in to a certainty before the magistrate, but if you give it him well, he knows he deserves it. You must be careful, however, not to overdo it, for they are very soft, and four out of five have enlarged spleens, and they are capable without any exaggeration of dying to spite you.’
“14th Oct., Sunday.– I am worse again to-day, and can do nothing but sit up and lie down, and wish I was dead. The Moslem servants have found out we are different from the rest of their masters on board, and are very attentive. What irritates them particularly, they have told Sabunji, is that nobody speaks to them by name, but only as ‘boy’ here, and ‘boy’ there. There is a bitter hatred between them and the passengers, and no wonder. Not that there is any actual ill-treatment by these – that was put a stop to three years ago by a strike among the Bengalis, who refused any longer to be beaten on the British India boats – but brow-beating there is in plenty. Last night young Langa, Mrs. Palmer’s brother, came to sit with us. He told us he had been given his place in the Indian Mint, although he was not even an Englishman. His father had been a Polish patriot, and he was indignant at the way the natives were treated on board. He is an amiable boy of about twenty-three, very like his sister in face and voice. A yellow butterfly was blown on board to-day.
“15th to 18th Oct.– Too ill to write. Last night, however, we cast anchor at Colombo just after sunset. We expected our friends to come to us on board, but I was too tired to care. Sabunji went forth like the raven from the Ark, and did not any more return!”
The next three weeks I spent grievously sick, and then beginning to be convalescent, at Colombo. On the morning of the nineteenth our friends Mahmud Sami and Arabi came on board to take us to a beautiful country house the former had prepared for us, and on landing we were received by a deputation from the Mohammedans of the town. The whole road we found had been decorated with flowers for our reception, and there was a triumphal arch at the entrance to the house, which was some miles from the landing-place. I was carried through it all, hardly conscious of what was going on, nor of the fireworks and illuminations which took place in my honour in the evening. My journal contains no record of these days until the 3rd of November, when I find a pleasant description of my daily life.
“3rd Nov.– I get up every morning as soon as it is light, and am carried to the verandah, where I sit and watch the rather curious view which is in front of the house. The house stands fronting a piece of fresh water, which is the river’s mouth and is used by the fishing boats as a harbour. Beyond it there is a long strip of sand covered with green bushes, and beyond that again the sea. The fishing boats come in over the surf at daybreak, and then double back up the reach of still water, and just in front of the house are run up on the shore. It is astonishing how fast they sail, and how steady they are in the breakers. But they are of Catamaran build, and seem able to go where they like, and do what they like. They are quite light, too, for a man and a boy can pull them up high and dry without difficulty. When out at sea, those on board are half in the water, but they cannot upset, because as they heel over there is a spar resting on the water to which the boat is spliced. They are obliged, however, to run before the wind as they cannot easily tack. Then, soon after sunrise, boys come with goats which they turn out to graze on the green bushes; and then men with horses and oxen which they bathe in the river. None of the men swim, but they stand about in the shallow water, ducking up and down and splashing each other, so that with their long hair they look just like women. The oxen come in carts, and are taken out and bathed with pails which are poured over their backs, and the ponies are treated in the same way. It is a very pretty sight, and the same beasts and people come every morning, so that I seem to know them all. I sit there in a dreamy state drinking my coffee, and then go back to bed.
“Later in the day a sofa is put for me under the other verandah by the garden, and I have another kind of view. There is a grove of bananas with fruit nearly ripe, and all day long the little gray squirrels, which are hardly bigger than mice, run over them, jumping from branch to branch and looking into the bunches to see if there are any ripe enough to eat. They make a shrill cry when a kite or crow passes overhead, which is like a bird’s. Then there are flowers, red and yellow and blue, which are visited by little birds like willow wrens, who get at the honey by pecking through the stalks. But in the middle of the day there are only butterflies, almost every day new ones, black and yellow, black and blue, and once one black and green; also small yellow butterflies, and black and white ones, and a butterfly like a large red Admiral, and that great russet-coloured one which one sees everywhere in Asia and North Africa, a link between the East and the West, Chrysippus. These sometimes come into the verandah, and are near getting caught in the great spiders’ webs under the roof. The afternoons are generally rainy, but after the showers lizards come out and climb the bushes, and they have a favourite bush with dark leaves, in which one day I saw a chameleon. About four o’clock the sky becomes dark with hooded crows and jackdaws returning from the town to an island on the river where they roost. They raise a great clamour, and I have made a calculation that about seventy thousand pass every evening across the small bit of sky which I can see. They often stop on a banyan tree as they go by, or on the coco-nut palms. The other birds seem all afraid of them. At last, as it gets dark, they are gone, and then two little black and white robins come out and sit on a post and rail, and hiss at each other like blackcaps, and a pair of listless yellow-legged thrushes follow them and hop about among the grass. Then it gradually gets quite dark, and the fireflies come out chased by birds like nightjars, and the lamp is lit, and Cowie brings me my tea, and I am carried back to bed. This has been my life these twenty days.”
During these three weeks, which in some ways were among the happiest of my life, for I always look back to the periods of recovery from a severe illness as being such, I was not without visits from our friends the Egyptian exiles and others of the Mohammedan community of Colombo. Arabi, especially, came daily to see me, and I found him of an extreme gentleness and kindness in a sick room. He was anxious to do all he could for me, and recommended me such remedies as are used by the fellahin in Egypt, and even took off from his arm, where he habitually wore it, a little leathern bag containing a charm or incantation and placed it upon mine. To this he attributed my recovery, and it may have been effective in this way, combined with the fresh milk which formed for the first fortnight my sole diet. I tried to believe it, and would have willingly believed too the other articles of his simple fellah faith. With Arabi and the other exiles I naturally had much talk about the past events of their country. But what they told me I need not here recapitulate, as I have already embodied it with much else in my Egyptian Memoirs.
I find in my diary that on the 6th of November I went out for my first drive, and that in the company of Arabi and Abd-el-Aal I went into Colombo, and that we saw Gregory’s statue together in the Cinnamon Gardens, and three days later that I attended a public dinner given in my honour by the local Mohammedans. At this I made a public speech. Arabi had proposed the Queen’s health in a few words of Arabic, and my own speech took the form of a return of thanks. From the date of their arrival at Colombo, the exiles had been exceedingly well treated by the Governor of the Island and his subordinates, and were in the habit of being invited to all the great receptions at Government House. And on the other hand, with their own co-religionists, they had attained a position of the highest