Glimpses of Bengal Part 4

As the river runs through many a clime, so does the stream of men babble on, winding through woods and villages and towns. It is not a true contrast that _men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever_.

Humanity, with all its confluent streams, big and small, flows on and on, just as does the river, from its source in birth to its sea of death;--two dark mysteries at either end, and between them various play and work and chatter unceasing.

Over there the cultivators sing in the fields: here the fis.h.i.+ng-boats float by. The day wears on and the heat of the sun increases. Some bathers are still in the river, others are finished and are taking home their filled water-vessels. Thus, past both banks of the river, hundreds of years have hummed their way, while the refrain rises in a mournful chorus: _I go on for ever!_

Amid the noonday silence some youthful cowherd is heard calling at the top of his voice for his companion; some boat splashes its way homewards; the ripples lap against the empty jar which some village woman rests on the water before dipping it; and with these mingle several other less definite sounds,--the twittering of birds, the humming of bees, the plaintive creaking of the house-boat as it gently swings to and fro,--the whole making a tender lullaby, as of a mother trying to quiet a suffering child.

"Fret not," she sings, as she soothingly pats its fevered forehead. "Worry not; weep no more. Let be your strugglings and grabbings and fightings; forget a while, sleep a while."

SHELIDAH,

3_rd Kartik_ (_October_) 1891.

It was the _Kojagar_ full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool?

But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest sh.o.r.e of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this sh.o.r.e, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of gra.s.s on the fresh-formed island sand-bank.

It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world,--all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite sh.o.r.e--the sh.o.r.e of life--where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes.

SHELIDAH,

9_th January_ 1892.

For some days the weather here has been wavering between Winter and Spring. In the morning, perhaps, s.h.i.+vers will run over both land and water at the touch of the north wind; while the evening will thrill with the south breeze coming through the moonlight.

There is no doubt that Spring is well on its way. After a long interval the _papiya_ once more calls out from the groves on the opposite bank. The hearts of men too are stirred; and after evening falls, sounds of singing are heard in the village, showing that they are no longer in such a hurry to close doors and windows and cover themselves up snugly for the night.

To-night the moon is at its full, and its large, round face peers at me through the open window on my left, as if trying to make out whether I have anything to say against it in my letter,--it suspects, maybe, that we mortals concern ourselves more with its stains than its beams.

A bird is plaintively crying tee-tee on the sand-bank. The river seems not to move. There are no boats. The motionless groves on the bank cast an unquivering shadow on the waters. The haze over the sky makes the moon look like a sleepy eye kept open.

Henceforward the evenings will grow darker and darker; and when, to-morrow, I come over from the office, this moon, the favourite companion of my exile, will already have drifted a little farther from me, doubting whether she had been wise to lay her heart so completely bare last evening, and so covering it up again little by little.

Nature becomes really and truly intimate in strange and lonely places. I have been actually worrying myself for days at the thought that after the moon is past her full I shall daily miss the moonlight more and more; feeling further and further exiled when the beauty and peace which awaits my return to the riverside will no longer be there, and I shall have to come back through darkness.

Anyhow I put it on record that to-day is the full moon--the first full moon of this year's springtime. In years to come I may perchance be reminded of this night, with the tee-tee of the bird on the bank, the glimmer of the distant light on the boat off the other sh.o.r.e, the s.h.i.+ning expanse of river, the blur of shade thrown by the dark fringe of trees along its edge, and the white sky gleaming overhead in unconcerned aloofness.

SHELIDAH,

7_th April_ 1892.

The river is getting low, and the water in this arm of it is hardly more than waist-deep anywhere. So it is not at all extraordinary that the boat should be anch.o.r.ed in mid-stream. On the bank, to my right, the ryots are ploughing and cows are now and then brought down to the water's edge for a drink. To the left there are the mango and cocoanut trees of the old Shelidah garden above, and on the bathing slope below there are village women was.h.i.+ng clothes, filling water jars, bathing, laughing and gossiping in their provincial dialect.

The younger girls never seem to get through their sporting in the water; it is a delight to hear their careless, merry laughter. The men gravely take their regulation number of dips and go away, but girls are on much more intimate terms with the water. Both alike babble and chatter and ripple and sparkle in the same simple and natural manner; both may languish and fade away under a scorching glare, yet both can take a blow without hopelessly breaking under it. The hard world, which, but for them, would be barren, cannot fathom the mystery of the soft embrace of their arms.

Tennyson has it that woman to man is as water to wine. I feel to-day it should be as water is to land. Woman is more at home with the water, laving in it, playing with it, holding her gatherings beside it; and while, for her, other burdens are not seemly, the carrying of water from the spring, the well, the bank of river or pool, has ever been held to become her.

BOLPUR,

2_nd May_ 1892.

There are many paradoxes in the world and one of them is this, that wherever the landscape is immense, the sky unlimited, clouds intimately dense, feelings unfathomable--that is to say where infinitude is manifest--its fit companion is one solitary person; a mult.i.tude there seems so petty, so distracting.

An individual and the infinite are on equal terms, worthy to gaze on one another, each from his own throne. But where many men are, how small both humanity and infinitude become, how much they have to knock off each other, in order to fit in together! Each soul wants so much room to expand that in a crowd it needs must wait for gaps through which to thrust a little craning piece of a head from time to time.

So the only result of our endeavour to a.s.semble is that we become unable to fill our joined hands, our outstretched arms, with this endless, fathomless expanse.

BOLPUR,

8_th Jaistha_ (_May_) 1892.

Women who try to be witty, but only succeed in being pert, are insufferable; and as for attempts to be comic they are disgraceful in women whether they succeed or fail. The comic is ungainly and exaggerated, and so is in some sort related to the sublime. The elephant is comic, the camel and the giraffe are comic, all overgrowth is comic.

It is rather keenness that is akin to beauty, as the thorn to the flower.

So sarcasm is not unbecoming in woman, though coming from her it hurts.

But ridicule which savours of bulkiness woman had better leave to our sublime s.e.x. The masculine Falstaff makes our sides split, but a feminine Falstaff would only rack our nerves.

BOLPUR,

12_th Jaistha_ (_May_) 1892.

I usually pace the roof-terrace, alone, of an evening. Yesterday afternoon I felt it my duty to show my visitors the beauties of the local scenery, so I strolled out with them, taking Agh.o.r.e as a guide.

On the verge of the horizon, where the distant fringe of trees was blue, a thin line of dark blue cloud had risen over them and was looking particularly beautiful. I tried to be poetical and said it was like blue collyrium on the fringe of lashes enhancing a beautiful blue eye. Of my companions one did not hear the remark, another did not understand, while the third dismissed it with the reply: "Yes, very pretty." I did not feel encouraged to attempt a second poetical flight.

After walking about a mile we came to a dam, and along the pool of water there was a row of _tal_ (fan palm) trees, under which was a natural spring. While we stood there looking at this, we found that the line of cloud which we had seen in the North was making for us, swollen and grown darker, flashes of lightning gleaming the while.