Winter India/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
LUCKNOW
HERE was a truly Oriental hotel at Lucknow—a great, long, low, white palace of a building, with an arcaded front upon which the rooms opened. There was a noble drawing-room, strewn with the myriad little tables, dwarf chairs, and knickknacks of British middle-class esthetic fashion, but glorified by a great display of marigolds. The dinner-table was such another feast of marigolds that one forgave, or forgot, what came on the plates. The bedchambers were vast, cavernous, sunless caves, with their ceilings lost in remote shadows; the beds high, hard catafalques in the center of each such town hall. We spread rugs, blankets, and razais on these state couches, and, although the bundles of bedding had grown until they covered the top of a gharry, not all of them could soften or level those beds.
A typical, listless, shiftless, incompetent poll-parrot of a guide undertook to show us Lucknow. The most meager idea of the Mutiny, only the set phrases of local incident, had ever entered his head, along with a sordid idea of profit. "Two rupees a day, your ladyship," whined the creature, "and, if you like me, a little more for bakshish, your ladyship." And so his woolen comforter and embroidered cap rode on our carriage-box to the Kaiserbaugh, where in its walled garden the wicked Queen of Oudh and the three hundred women of the zenana lived in jewels and idleness, envied and hated by the ninety nautch dancers housed in the gate pavilion.
Lucknow's museum is indeed a "wonder-house," and, fortunate in having most energetic archæologists and ethnologists as its curators, its collections in those lines are most complete. This palace in a park contains in its first hall life-sized figures and groups illustrating the many races, tribes, and types of men in the empire, from the blue-eyed men of the Northwest to the inkiest Tamil and Andaman Islander. There is a distracting show of textiles and embroideries, of beasts, birds, metal-work, wood and ivory carving, and such treasures of sculptured relics from Buddhist ruins that the India of fifteen and twenty centuries ago is as well portrayed. The guide knew nothing about any of these things, and to our questions answered moodily: "If your ladyship wishes me to tell you of the Mutiny, I can. If you will come down-stairs, I will explain the model of the Residency." Arrived at the model, the parrot glibly read off the names printed on each tiny roof, wall, and gate. "This is the Bailly Gate. This is the hospital," etc., etc. "Yes, yes," we answered. "We can read that. You go on and explain the model, and we will follow you." "But, your ladyship," wailed the parrot, "I am explaining it to you now. This is the Bailly Gate." "Gate to what?" we asked pitilessly. "Who was Bailly that they should name a gate for him?" The poor poll-parrot's only answer to such conundrums was a rigmarole about the size of the Residency. "The mutineers," "the rebels," "our forces," "the natives," and "the king's forces" rolled from his tongue without any mental effort. "Eighteen hundred people were besieged here for six months. Many died. More than two thousand of them were buried here." When asked to explain how two thousand could die if there were only eighteen hundred in the beginning, he whimpered: "But, your ladyship, let me tell you a little more about the Mutiny. Those poor people, how they suffered!"
One has rather too much of the Mutiny in India. It is decidedly overdone. It may be well to keep the great incident alive in native memory, along with the justly terrible reprisals; but the tourist gets sated with England's woes and foes of '57, and recalls other wars and sieges since, and trusts that the next generation is not to be harrowed with the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking, Tientsin and Peking. Yet that tale of English courage and endurance is so familiar to all of us, that none can fail to be deeply stirred by the sight of the battered Bailly Gate and the pathetic, roofless Residency—a vine-wreathed, eloquent monument, England's flag still flying night and day from the tower that never surrendered. It is the most eloquent, the most human and speaking ruin that I know; and in that beautiful garden not a voice is raised, nor an irreverent word heard, every sound unconsciously hushed by the associations. The climax is reached at the grave of Henry Lawrence, that great soldier who "tried to do his duty. May the Lord have mercy on his soul."
We turned away from the Residency door surfeited with sorrows. We could stand no more mute memorials of suffering. "What, memsahib! Will you not even see that cellar?" implored the guide, a chastened, tongue-tied soul since being informed that he would be dismissed with six annas only if he again addressed us as ladyships. "But the memsahibs all like it. We do it to please," he wailed. An old soldier, survivor of the scene, is guardian of the Residency, and he saw that we saw every bullet-hole and shell-mark, and visited every room down to the underground chambers intended as luxurious retreats in hot weather. The old veteran who had come in with Outram's relief in September, and fought through the second siege until Colin Campbell's final relief in November, made very real to us how a thousand people lived in that one building all the unusually hot summer of '57, with a plague of flies that covered the floors and walls and buzzed sickeningly over the people and their food.
We had then supped full of Mutiny horrors, and we broke with the program of sight-seeing and drove for hours,—first to the river bank where the dhobie-men were swinging, pounding, slapping wet garments with might and main, and spreading them out in acres of white mosaic on bank and common. We heeded not ruined Dilkusha, where Havelock died, nor the route of Campbell's advance. "Will the memsahib not even see the Secunderabad?" wailed the guide when we refused to look into that slaughter-pen, where sixteen hundred and forty sepoys, fleeing from the Highlanders, were bayoneted in a cul-de-sac. Even Lord Roberts has said that that surging heap of dead and dying, more than shoulder high against the wall, was an incident of war that sickened men bent on avenging the atrocities of Cawnpore.
We saw with interest the great Mohammedan Imambara, the arches of its court framing pictures of other domes and minarets, its mihrab pointing westward to Mecca, and its deep baoli, or well, with encircling marble galleries where it is always cool in summer. The clock-tower, the white mosque filled with mirrors like a Champs-Elysées café, and the old palace of the kings of Oudh hung with portraits of those flabby and ill-favored royalties, were tedious stock sights. We saw with far more interest the latest American magazines lying on the table of the United Service Club, which now occupies the old Umbrella House of the nawab, an important place during the siege.
Although it was a real city of palaces long before the Mutiny, and a larger place then than Calcutta or Bombay, the bazaars of this old native capital were not so very interesting; and, except in the silver bazaar, a plague of torpid flies tormented us. The perfume-shops were countless, and we sniffed gums, grasses, woods, and attars of all the flowers, until we could not tell the precious rose attar, that sells at four times its weight in silver, from the rose-water at twelve cents a quart that one carries for ablutions on railway trains.
Again we caught sight of the square gray tower,—the tower that Mrs. Steele has introduced so well in "Voices of the Night,"—and the dreadful depression of Mutiny memories fell upon us. The dark, vaulted bedchambers of the hotel were too suggestive of the Residency cellar, and rather than pass a night in the city of such associations, or stop the next day to feed on the greater horrors of Cawnpore, we took the afternoon train for Agra. Some tourists came on at Cawnpore, anxious to escape from the horror of it. They had seen it all, and suffered all the terrible deaths in imagination, from the ghats where the boat-loads of English were burned, drowned, or murdered in cold blood by the fiendish Nana Sahib, to the room where the women and children were bayoneted and clubbed against the wall, and the crowning agony of the memorial angel over the well of burial—all explained in detail by an old soldier survivor.
Regarding Agra as the most important tourist place in India, it is disconcerting to have to reach it by cross-roads, way-trains, and branch lines, arriving always between midnight and daylight. We changed at Tundla Junction in a deluge of rain, and rode in a crowded car, seven in a single compartment, without any lamps, for an hour to Agra.
A huge turban from the hotel claimed us, and when the file of baggage coolies had trailed after us to the entrance, I said, "Get me a gharry." "Very well, madam. Very well. Very well," said the turban, flourishing his cane. After five minutes I repeated the order to turban tramping madly up and down the flagstones, cuffing coolies and bawling at every one and no one. "Very well, very well, madam," said this madman of Agra. Another appeal only pulled the string for another shower of "very wells," and nothing happened. I bade the bearer bring a gharry at once, and after big turban had beaten the air, beaten the bearer, and the two had screeched a mad dialogue, two lean horses and a rattletrap night-liner drew up and took us inside, the luggage on the roof, the turban on the box, and the bearer on behind. The ill-matched horses made a dash out from the lamplighted station, across the great common before Akbar's red sandstone fort, and took a turn entirely round a tree-box. After a second and a third turn around the tree, I put my head out and said severely, "Take us to the Hotel ." "Very well. Very well, madam," floated down from the box, and with a jerk and a leap the ponies made another tour of the tree. We continued to whirl and circle around that sapling by the light of a thin, wet moon, wrangling voices and whip-crackings from overhead drowning any further directions to drive to the hotel. Our friends, following in the next gharry, thought the first circlings a runaway; then, hearing the voices from the box, arrived at another idea, and cried: "Oh, come on to the hotel. It's no use trying to see the Taj now. It is after one o'clock."
Our answer was lost as the ponies ran around the tree again. In time the bearer was made to understand, and to lead the ponies by the bridle out of the enchanted square, and they splashed along soberly enough through wet and gloomy avenues to the far-away hotel. This was an incongruous, opera-bouffe sort of arrival in and introduction to the city of one's soul and dreams, where more of sentiment, beauty, and haunting charm abide than in all the peninsula; but sentiment with difficulty survives the disenchantment and jarring contacts of Indian travel. One must see India and spend his sentiment on it afterward.