Chapter XIV: Dehra Dun and Landour

A grey squirrel dropped from the roof on to the table, scrambled over the papers beside the magistrate's hand, and scampered away into the adjoining room.

I was sitting in the Deputy-Magistrate's Court at Dehra Dun, waiting beside the D.-M., while he discussed a matter of land compensation with a stout gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, and I learned that "Government" pays compensation of fifteen per cent. plus the market-value, of land taken for engineering works. Our chairs were upon a raised part of the floor, divided from the other two-thirds of the room by a wooden railing, behind which a number of people waited audience, and among them I noticed the round face of a little Goorkha Subadar, with the silver badge of crossed knives on his forage cap. Dehra Dun is the headquarters of the Goorkhas, and, thanks to the kindness of Colonel Crommelin, I was able to see the smart bayonet practice and physical drill of the Second Battalion of the 9th Goorkha Rifles.

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Among the military forces, however, a mountain battery interested me most. Dehra Dun is not, of course, a hill station, but there is plenty of hilly ground close to it, and this No. 32 Battery was put through its paces for my benefit on a steep piece of rocky ground, the mules kicking and bucking like creatures possessed.

The guns, painted a pale coffee colour, are worked by Punjabis, and one of these posed for me to paint him in the blazing sun with extraordinary patience. I was told that these troops very rarely suffer from sunstroke, but that when some of them went to China a regular epidemic of heat apoplexy was experienced, due probably in large part to the power of suggestion aroused by two or three cases of such an unusual trouble.

In his khaki turban the Punjabi wears a roll or crest of scarlet cloth which glows far more brightly in the sun than can be represented on canvas. Beside this burning red the most brilliant tint I could command was as far from the true pitch as the dry watercourse in the valley was different from its flooded aspect after rain.

It is not only the Punjabi turban that cries gaiety aloud at Dehra Dun. I saw the dak tree here which bears large scarlet blossoms, and when in flower finely justifies its popular name of "Flame of the Forest." There are many {211} kinds of trees to make the Dun beautiful, and when I started early one February morning for Mussoorie I drove in a tumtum at first through tall bamboos, eucalyptus, fir trees, mangoes, sal, peepul, plum, cherry and a host of others. Before me the great foothills of the Himalayas blushed warm and rosy, and along the crest of the higher ridges above, the white houses of Mussoorie showed in streaks and lines and patches as if a little snow had remained unmelted after a recent fall. I passed the tents of the X-Ray Institute of India and drove steadily on to Rajpur, gradually acquiring a considerable escort of boys from that village mounted on ponies, which they urged me to engage for the ascent to Mussoorie.

Rajpur consists of one long straggling street of small shops, and here I left the tumtum and hired two coolies, to carry my baggage, and a horse for myself. On this road I passed again and again living embodiments of toil--men carrying baulks of timber on their backs. They looked almost dramatically terrible, not like Leighton's exultant Samson bearing the doors of the city gate in triumph to the hilltop, but weary in mute submission to the burden of mortality.

In this matter of bearing burdens of physical material weight the part is played with more universal similarity even than that of going {212} without food. Jean François Millet was reproached with painting his men carrying a calf on a litter as if they were carrying the Host, but the truth is--as he explained in one of his letters--the expression of men carrying depends upon the weight, and whether they had the Ark of the Covenant or a calf, a lump of gold or a stone, the same expression would be the result; the weight of timber was just near enough to breaking strain for these men's bodily tension to produce an air of slow solemn travail impressive as a religious penance and appealing as an heroic endurance.

Landour is higher than Mussoorie, and as I wanted to see the mountains at early morning, it seemed better, if possible, to sleep at Landour. An American missionary on a pony was buying dried peas at a shop in the bazaar, and after explaining to me that he was a vegetarian, as if that were an original idea and a condition of personal merit deserving of awe, he advised me to try for shelter at a certain Mrs Sharp's who had, as he rightly supposed, a suite of rooms to let.

This good woman, a nurse by profession, had living with her three grandchildren, a girl of twelve and two boys rather younger, neither of whose parents (of pure English blood) India born, had ever been out of the country. These {213} children were the first examples I had met of a second generation of English born in India, and a very healthy and merry trio they were. The father had been an engine-driver, and the mother, since his death, had had to get work at a distant town. These bonny, apple-faced youngsters certainly showed the possibility of healthy rearing of English children in India, but they had spent their little lives as yet entirely in the healthy mountain air of Landour, and far from enervating influences.

Mrs Sharp was a genial old lady of optimistic temperament, whose chief anxiety seemed to be to keep on good terms with her native cook and to make other people happy. A young railway guard was staying with her for a short holiday, and in the evening I was asked to look in on a homely party in their living-room, where a young English girl from a Mussoorie milliner's store played a piano and sang songs called--"We're all the world to each other, Daddy."--"For I've got you and you've got me," and "I'll love you, dear, for ever." The last-named brought easy tears to the eyes of Mrs Sharp, who declared with heaving unction "that's my favourite song." The more treacly the sentiment the more they all enjoyed the words, and the whole scene with the badinage and byplay of the English lower class was a curious contrast to the Indian life I had been seeing.

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Happy and innocent people they were, with all their affectations on the surface, through which sterling qualities peeped unobtrusively--people (whose æsthetic sense was far less than that of a bower-bird) lacking all delicacy of either eye or ear, lacking any faintest spiritual conception beyond a heaven of solid twangable golden harps and paper decorations called Jacob's Ladders, open and honest as the day--feeding all the stray cats of Landour as well as the five they delight to own--in a word so essentially British that in a distant land one of the same nation is moved first to smile at meeting them and then to run his fleetest!

It was an easy stroll in the morning to the top of Landour where my feet crunched dry hard snow, and it was cold--very cold work to sit painting. I spent most of the day up there. Looking back over the plains all was haze in the afternoon and mist in the morning, and in the opposite direction clouds covered the snow-peaks of the Himalayas. The best view I had of the plains, however, was on the next day from Mussoorie, lower down--Mussoorie, that growing collection of bungalows and hotels soon to be filled for the season by the annual rush from below for health and cooler air.

Just beneath me I could see St Fidelis, the Soldiers' Orphanage, the St George's College, boarding-school for European boys, and beyond {215} in the distance the dry zigzag bed of a tributary of the Ganges. Dehra Dun sat in the valley, and far away to the right, very faint indeed, rose the Siwaliks, the hills where once roamed monstrous elephants.

I walked down to Rajpur and being directed upon a wrong path was involved in a tramp of fourteen miles instead of the six taken by the old road from Mussoorie. There was little to vary the monotony of the road--a flock of white sheep--an English lady and her children being carried up in "dandies"--a tree fallen across the path. All through the hottest hours of the day I kept steadily on, and Tambusami, if he was not actually done up, pretended to be so, and when I insisted on watching a native tightrope dancer at Rajpur instead of getting into our tumtum, he was as near active revolt as his peaceable nature would permit.

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