Baboo Jabberjee, B.A Part 6

I was recently the payer of a ceremonial visit to a friend of my boyhood, namely, BABOO CHUCKERb.u.t.tY RAM, with whom, finding him at home in his lodgings in a distant suburb, I did hold politely affectionate intercourse for the s.p.a.ce of two hours, and then departed, as I had come, by train, and the sole occupant of a second-cla.s.s dual compartment divided by a low part.i.tion.

At the next station the adjoining compartment was suddenly invaded by a portly female of the matronly type, with a rubicund countenance and a bonnet in a dismantled and lopsided condition, who was bundled through the doorway by the impetuosity of a porter, and occupied a seat in immediate opposition to myself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A BEAMING SIMPER OF INDESCRIBABLE SUAVITY."]

When the train resumed its motion, I observed that she was contemplating me with a beaming simper of indescribable suavity, and though she was of an unornamental exterior and many years my superior, I constrained myself from motives of merest politeness to do some simperings in return, since only a churlish would grudge such an economical and inexpensive civility.

But whether she was of an unusually ardent temperament, or whether, against my volition, I had invested my simper with an irresistible winsomeness, I cannot tell; but she fell to making nods and becks and wreathed smiles which reduced me to crimsoned sheepishness, and the necessity of looking earnestly out of window at vacancy.

At this she entreated me pa.s.sionately not to be unkind, inviting me to cross to the next compartment and seat myself by her side; but I did nill this invitation politely, urging that Company's bye-laws countermanded the placing of boots upon the seat-cus.h.i.+ons, and my utter inability to pose as a _Romeo_ to scale the barrier.

Whereupon to my lively horror and amazement, she did exclaim, "Then I will come to _you_, darling!" and commenced to scramble precipitately towards me over the part.i.tion!

At which I was in the blue funk, perceiving the _arcanum_ of her design to embrace me, and resolved to leave no stone unturned for the preservation of my bacon. So, at the moment she made the entrance into my compartment, I did simultaneously hop the twig into the next, and she followed in pursuit, and I once more achieved the return with inconceivable agility.

Then, as we were both, like _Hamlet_, fat and short of breath, I addressed her gaspingly across the barrier, a.s.suring her that it was as if to milk the ram to set her bonnet at a poor young native chap who regarded her with nothing but platonical esteem, and advising her to sit down for the recovery of her wind.

But alack! this speech only operated to inspire her with _spretae injuria formae_, and flouris.h.i.+ng a large stalwart umbrella, she exclaimed that she would teach me how to insult a lady.

After that she came floundering once again over the part.i.tion, and guarding my loins, I leapt into the next compartment, seeing the affair had become a _sauve qui peut_, and devil take the hindmost: and at the nick of time, when she was about to descend like a wolf on a fold, I most fortunately perceived a bell-handle provided for such pressing emergencies and rung it with such unparalleled energy, that the train immediately became stationary.

Then, as my female persecutress alighted on the floor of the compartment in the limp condition of a collapse, I stepped across to my original seat, and endeavoured to look as if with withers unwrung. Presently the Guard appeared, and what followed I can best render in the dramatical form of a dialogue:--

_The Guard_ (_addressing the ~Elderly Female~, who is sitting smiling with vacuity beneath the bell-pull_). So it is you who have sounded the alarm! What is it all about?

_The Elderly Female_ (_with warm indignation_). Me? I never did! I am too much of the lady. It was that young coloured gentleman in the next compartment.

[_At which the tip of my nose goes down with apprehensiveness._

_The Guard._ Indeed! A likely story! How could the gentleman ring this bell from where he is?

_Myself_ (_with mental presence_). Well said, Mister GUARD! The thing is not humanly possible. _Rem acu tetigisti!_

_The Guard._ I do not understand Indian, Sir. If you have anything to say about this affair, you had better say it.

_Myself_ (_combining discretion with magnanimousness_). As a chivalrous, I must decline to bring any accusation against a member of the weaker s.e.x, and my tongue is hermetically sealed.

_The Eld. F._ It was _him_ who rang the alarm, and not me. He was in this compartment, and I in that.

_The Guard._ What? have you been playing at Hide-and-seek together, then? But if your story is watertight, he must have rung the bell in a state of abject bodily terror, owing to your chivying him about!

_The Eld. F._ It is false! I have been well educated, and belong to an excellent family. I merely wanted to kiss him.

_The Guard._ I see what is your complaint. You have been imbibing the drop too much and will hear of this from the Company. I must trouble you, Mam, for your correct name and address.

_Myself_ (_after he had obtained this and was departing_). Mister Guard, I do most earnestly entreat you not to abandon me to the tender mercies of this feminine. I am not a proficient in physical courage, and have no desire to test the correctness of Poet POPE'S a.s.sertion, that h.e.l.l does not possess the fury of a scorned woman. I request to be conducted into a better-populated compartment.

_The Guard_ (_with complimentary jocosity_). Ah, such young good-looking chaps as you ought to go about in a veil. Come with me, and I'll put you into a smoker-carriage. You won't be run after there!

So the incident was closed, and I did greatly compliment myself upon the sagacity and coolness of head with which I extricated myself from my pretty kettle of fish. For to have denounced myself as the real alarmist would have rendered the affair more, rather than less, discreditable to my feminine companion, and I should have been arraigned before the solemn bar of a police-court magistrate, who might even have made a Star Chamber matter of the incident.

All is well that is well over, but when you have been once bitten, you become doubly bashful. Consequently, this humble self will take care that he does not on any subsequent occasion travel alone in a railway compartment with a female woman.

XII

_Mr Jabberjee is taken by surprise._

Diligent perusers of my lucubrations to _Punch_ will remember that I have devoted sundry jots and t.i.ttles to the subject of Miss JESSIMINA MANKLETOW, and already may have concluded that I was long since up to the hilt in the tender pa.s.sion. In this deduction, however, they would have manufactured a stentorian cry from an extreme paucity of wool; the actual fact being that, although percipient of the well-proportionate symmetry of her person and the ladylike liveliness of her deportment, I did never regard her except with eyes of strictly platonic philandering and calf love.

It is true that, at certain seasons, the ostentatious favours she would squander upon other young masculine boarders in my presence did reduce me to the doleful dump of despair, so that even the birds and beasts of forest shed tears at my misery, and frequently at meal-times I have sought to move her to compa.s.sion by neighing like horse, or by the incessant rolling of my visual organs; though she did only attribute such _ad misericordiam_ appeals to the excessive gravity of the cheese, or the immaturity of the rhubarb pie.

But I was then a labourer under the impression that I was the odd man out of her affections, and it is well known that, to a sensitive, it is intolerable to feel that oneself is not the object of adoration, even to one to whom we may entertain but a mediocre attraction.

On a recent evening we had a _tete-a-tete_ which culminated in the utter surprise. It was the occasion of our hebdomadal dancing-party at Porticobello House, and I had solicited her to become a copartner with this una.s.suming self in the maziness of a waltz; but, not being the carpet-knight, and consequently treading the measure with too great frequency upon the toes of my fair auxiliary, she suggested a temporary withdrawal from circulation.

To which I a.s.senting, she conducted me to a landing whereon was a small glazed apartment, screened by hangings and furnished with a profusion of unproductive pots, which is styled the conservatory, and here we did sit upon two wicker-worked chairs, and for a while were mutually _sotto voce_.

Presently I, remarking with corner of eye the sumptuousness of her appearance, and the supercilious indifference of her demeanour, which made it seem totally improbable that she should ever, like _Desdemona_, seriously incline to treat me as an _Oth.e.l.lo_, commenced to heave the sighs of a fire-stove, causing Miss JESSIMINA to accuse me of desiring myself in India.

I denied this with native hyperbolism, saying that I was content to remain in _statu quo_ until the doom cracked, and that the conservatory was for me the equivalent of Paradise.

She replied that its similitude to Paradise would be more startling if a larger proportion of the pots had contained plants, and if such plants as there were had not fallen into such a lean and slippered stage of decrepitude, adding that she did perpetually urge her mamma to incur the expense of some geranium-blooms and a few fairy-lamps, but she had refused to run for such adornments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I BECAME ONCE MORE THE SILENT TOMB."]

And I, with spontaneous gallantry, retorted that she was justified in such parsimony, since her daughter's eyes supplied such fairy illumination, and upon her cheeks was a bloom brighter than many geraniums. But this compliment she unhappily mistook as an insinuation that her complexion was of meretricious composition, and seeing that I had put my foot into a _cul-de-sac_, I became once more the silent tomb, and exhaled sighs at intervals.

Presently she declared once more that she saw, from the dullness of my expression, that I was longing for the luxurious magnificence of my Indian palace.

Now my domestic abode, though a respectable s.p.a.cious sort of residence, and containing my father, mother, married brothers, &c., together with a few antique unmarried aunts, is not at all of a palatial architecture; but it is a bad bird that blackens his own nest, and so I merely answered that I was now so saturated with Western civilisation, that I had lost all taste for Oriental splendours.

Next she inquired whether I did not miss the tiger-shooting and pig-sticking; and I replied (with veraciousness, since I am not the _au fait_ in such sports) that I could not deny a liability to miss both tigers and pigs, and, indeed, all animals that were _ferae naturae_, and she condemned the hazardousness of these jungle sports, and wished me to promise that I would abstain from them on my return to India.

To this I replied that before I agreed to such a self-denying ordinance, I desired to be more convinced of the sincerity of her interest in the preservation of my humble existence.

Miss JESSIMINA asked what had she done that I should be in dubitation as to her _bona fides_?

Then I did meekly remind her of her flirtatious preferences for the young beef-witted London chaps, and her incert.i.tude and disdainful capriciousness towards myself, who was not a beetlehead or an obtuse, but a cultivated native gentleman with high-cla.s.s university degree, and an oratorical flow of language which was infallibly to land me upon the pinnacle of some tip-top judicial preferment in the Calcutta High Court of Justice.

She made the excuse that she was compelled by financial reasons to be pleasant to the male boarders, and that I could not expect any marked favouritism so long as I kept my tongue concealed inside my damask cheek like a worm in bud.

Upon which, transported by uncontrollable emotion, I ventured to embrace her, a.s.suring her that she was the cynosure of my neighbouring eyes, and supplied the vacuum and long-felt want of my soul, and while occupied in imprinting a chaste salute upon her rosebud lips--who'd have thought it!

her severe matronly parent popped in through the curtains and, surveying me with a cold and basilican eye, did demand my intentions.