The Elephant God, Gordon Casserly [best books to read all time txt] 📗

The Lieutenant-Governor's ball was for Noreen but the beginning of a long series of social entertainments, of afternoon and evening dances, receptions, dinner and supper parties, concerts, and amateur theatrical performances that filled every date on the calendar of the Darjeeling Season. Only in winter sport resorts like St. Moritz and Mürren had she ever seen its like. But in Switzerland the visitors come from many lands and are generally strangers to each other, whereas in the Hills in India the summer residents of the villas and the guests at the big hotels are of the same race and class, come from the same stations in the Plains or know of each other by repute. For, with the exception of the comparatively few lawyers, planters, merchants, or railway folk, the names of all are set forth in the two Golden Books of the land, the Army List and the Civil Service List; and hostesses fly with relief to the blessed "Table of Precedence" contained in them, which tells whether the wife of Colonel This should go in to dinner before or after the spouse of Mr. That. The great god Snob is the supreme deity of Anglo-India.

Many hill-stations are the Hot Weather headquarters of some important Government official, such as the Governor of the Presidency or the Lieutenant-Governor or Chief Commissioner of the Province. These are great personages indeed in India. They have military guards before their doors. The Union Jack waves by command above their august heads. They have Indian Cavalry soldiers to trot before their wives' carriages when these good ladies drive down to bargain in the native bazaar. But to the hill visitors their chief reason for existing is that their position demands the giving of official entertainments to which all of the proper class (who duly inscribe their names in the red-bound, gold-lettered book in the hall of Government House) have a prescriptive right to be invited.

Noreen revelled in the gaieties. Her frank-hearted enjoyment was like a child's, and made every man who knew her anxious to add to it. She could not possibly ride all the ponies offered to her nor accept half the invitations that she got. Even among the women she was popular, for none but a match-making mother or a jealous spinster could resist her.

Proposals of marriage were not showered on her, as persons ignorant of Anglo-Indian life fondly believe to be the lot of every English girl there. While a dowerless maiden still has a much better chance of securing a husband in a land where maidens are few and bachelors are many, yet the day has long gone by when every spinster who had drawn a blank in England could be shipped off to India with the certainty of finding a spouse there. Frequent leave and fast steamers have altered that. When a man can go home in a fortnight every year or second year he is not as anxious to snatch at the first maiden who appears in his station as his predecessor who lived in India in the days when a voyage to England took six months. And men in the East are as a rule not anxious to marry. A wife out there is a handicap at every turn. She adds enormously to his expenses, and her society too often lends more brightness to the existence of his fellows than his own. Children are ruinous luxuries. Bachelor life in Mess or club is too pleasant, sport that a single man can enjoy more readily than a married one too attractive, rupees too few for what Kipling terms "the wild ass of the desert" to be willing to put his head into the halter readily.

Yet men do marry in India—one wonders why!—and a girl there has so many opportunities of meeting the opposite sex every day, and so little rivalry, that her chances in the matrimonial market are infinitely better than at home. In stations in the Plains there are usually four or five men to every woman in its limited society, and the proportion of bachelors to spinsters is far greater. Sometimes in a military cantonment with five or six batteries and regiments in it, which, with departmental officers, may furnish a total of eighty to a hundred unmarried men from subalterns to colonels, there may be only one or two unwedded girls. The lower ranks are worse off for English spinster society; for the private soldier there is none.

Noreen's two most constant attendants were Charlesworth and Melville. The Indian Army officer's devotion and earnestness were patent to the world, but the Rifleman's intentions were a problem and a source of dispute among the women, who in Indian stations not less than other places watch the progress of every love-affair with the eyes of hawks. It was doubtful if Charlesworth himself knew what he wanted. He was a man who loved his liberty and his right to make love to each and every woman who caught his fancy. Noreen's casual liking for him but her frank indifference to him in any other capacity than that of a pleasant companion with whom to ride, dance, or play tennis, piqued him, but not sufficiently to make him risk losing his cherished freedom.

Chunerbutty left Darjeeling after a week's stay. Parry, having become sufficiently sober to enquire after him and learn of his absence, demanded his instant return in a telegram so profanely worded that it shocked even the Barwahi post-office babu. The engineer called on Noreen to say good-bye, and offered to be the bearer of a message to her brother. He kept up to the end the fable of his sick father.

He could not tell her the real reason of his coming to Darjeeling. The truth was that he had learned that the Rajah had inspired the attempt by the Bhuttias to carry off Noreen and wanted to see and upbraid him for his deceit and treachery to their agreement. There had been a furious quarrel when the two accomplices met. The Rajah taunted the other with his lack of success with Noreen and the failure of his plan to persuade her to marry him. Chunerbutty retorted that he had not been allowed sufficient time to win the favour of an English girl, who, unlike Indian maidens, was free to choose her own husband. And he threatened to inform the Government if any further attempt against her were made without his knowledge and approval. But the quarrel did not last long. Each scoundrel needed the help of the other. Still, Chunerbutty judged it safer to remove himself from the Rajah's house and find a lodging elsewhere, lest any deplorable accident might occur to him under his patron's roof.

After the engineer's departure Noreen seldom saw the Rajah, and then only at official entertainments, to which his position gained him invitations. He spoke to her once or twice at these receptions, but as a rule she contrived to elude him.

So far she had got on very well with Mrs. Smith. Their wills had never clashed, for the girl unselfishly gave in to her friend whenever the latter demanded it, which was often enough. Ida's ways were certainly not Noreen's, and the latter sometimes felt tempted to disapprove of her excessive familiarity with Captain Bain and one or two others. But the next moment she took herself severely to task for being censorious of the elder woman, who must surely know better how to behave towards men than a young unmarried girl who had been buried so long in the jungle. And Ida did not guess why sometimes her repentant little friend's caresses were so fervent and her desire to please her so manifest, and ascribed it all to her own sweetness of nature.

The coming of the Rains did not check the gaiety of the dwellers on the mountain-tops, though torrential downpours had to be faced on black nights in shrouded rickshas and dripping dandies, though incessant lightning lit up the road to