CHAPTER III: A GIRL OF THE TERAI

“How beautiful! How wonderful!” murmured the girl on the verandah, her eyes turned to the long line of the Himalayas filling the horizon to the north.

Clear against the blue sky the shining, ice-clad peaks of Kinchinjunga, a hundred miles away, towered high in air. Mystic, lovely, they seemed to float above the earth, as unsubstantial as the clouds from which they rose. They belonged to another world, a fairy world altogether apart from the rugged, tumbled masses, the awe-inspiring precipices and tremendous cliffs, of the nearer mountains. These were majestic, overpowering, but plainly of this earth, unlike the pure, white summits that seemed unreal, impossible in their beauty.

“Do come and look, Fred,” said the girl aloud. “I’ve never seen the Snows so clearly.”

She spoke to the solitary occupant of the dining-room of the bungalow. The young man at the breakfast table answered laughingly:

“I don’t want to look at those confounded hills, Sis. I’ve seen them, nothing but them, all through these long months, until I begin to hate the sight of them.”

“Oh, but do come, dear!” she pleaded. “Kinchinjunga has never seemed so beautiful as it does this morning. And it looks so near. Who could believe that it was all those miles away?”

With an air of pretended boredom and martyr-like resignation, her brother put down his coffee-cup and came out on the verandah.

“Isn’t it like Fairyland?” said the girl in an awed voice.

He put his arm affectionately round her, as he replied:

“Then it’s where you belong, kiddie, for you look like a fairy this morning.”

The hackneyed compliment, unusual from the lips of a brother, was not far-fetched. If a dainty little figure, an exquisitely pretty dimpled face, a shell-pink complexion, violet eyes with long, thick lashes, and naturally wavy golden hair be the hallmarks of the fairies, then Noreen Daleham might claim to be one. Her face in repose had a somewhat sad expression, due to the pathetic droop of the corners of her little mouth and a wistful look in her eyes that made most men instinctively desire to caress and console her. But the sadness and the wistfulness were unconscious and untrue, for the girl was of a sunny and happy disposition. And the men that desired to pet her were kept at a distance by her natural self-respect, which made them respect her, too.

She was, perhaps, somewhat unusual in her generation in that she did not indulge in flirtations and would have strongly objected to being the object of promiscuous caresses and light lovemaking. Her innate purity and innocence kept such things at a distance from her. It never occurred to her that a girl might indulge in a hundred flirtations without reproach. Without being sentimental she had her own inward, unexpressed feelings of romance and vague dreams of Love and a Lover—but not of loves and lovers in the plural.

No one so far had shattered her belief in the chivalrous feeling of respect of the other sex for her own. Men as a rule, especially British men—though they are no more virtuous than those of alien nations—treat a woman as she inwardly wants them to treat her. And, although this girl was over twenty, she had never yet had reason to suspect that men could behave to her with anything but respect.

Her small and shapely figure looked to advantage in the well-cut riding costume of khaki drill that she wore this morning. A cloth habit would have been too warm for even these early days of an Eastern Bengal hot weather. She was ready to accompany her brother in his early ride through the tea-garden (of which he was assistant manager) in the Duars, as this district of the Terai below the mountains is called. From the verandah on which they stood they could look over acres of trim and tidy bushes planted in orderly rows, a strong contrast to the wild disorder of the big trees and masses of foliage of the forest that lay beyond them and stretched to and along the foothills of the Himalayas only a few miles away.

Daleham’s father, a retired colonel, has died just as the boy was preparing to go up for the entrance examination for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. To his great grief he was obliged to give up all hope of becoming a soldier, and, when he left school, entered an office in the city. Passionately desirous of an open-air and active life he had afterwards eagerly snatched at an offer of employment by one of the great tea companies that are dotting the Terai with their plantations and sweeping away glorious spaces of wild, primeval forest to replace the trees by orderly rows of tea-bushes and unsightly iron-roofed factories.

Left with a small income inherited from her mother, Noreen Daleham, who was two years her brother’s junior, had gladly given up the dulness of a home with an aunt in a small country town to accompany her brother and keep house for him.

To most girls life on an Indian tea-garden would not seem alluring; for they would find themselves far from social gaieties and the society of their kind. Existence is lonely and lacking in the comforts, as well as the luxuries, of civilisation. Dances, theatres, concerts, even shops, are far, very far away. A woman must have mental resources to enable her to face contentedly life in a scantily-furnished, comfortless bungalow, dumped down in a monotonous stretch of unlovely tea-bushes. With little to occupy her she must rely for days at a time on the sole companionship of her man. To a young bride very much in love that may seem no hardship. But when the glamour has vanished she may change her mind.

To Noreen, however, the isolation was infinitely preferable to the narrow-minded and unfriendly intimacy of society in a country town with its snobbery and cliques. To be mistress of her own home and to be able to look after and mother her dearly-loved brother was a pleasant change from her position as a cipher in the household of a crotchetty, unsympathetic, maiden aunt. And fortunately for her the charm of the silent forest around them, the romance of the mysterious jungle with its dangers and its wonders, appealed strongly to her, and she preferred them to all the pleasures that London could offer. And yet the delights of town were not unknown to her. Her father’s first cousin, who had loved him but married a rich man, often invited the girl to stay with her in her house in Grosvenor Square. These visits gave her an insight into life in Mayfair with its attendant pleasures of dances in smart houses, dinners and suppers in expensive restaurants, the Opera and theatres, and afternoons at Ranelagh and Hurlingham. She enjoyed them all; she had enough money to dress well; and she was very popular. But London could not hold her. Her relative, who was childless, was anxious that Noreen should remain always with her, at least until she married—and the older woman determined that the girl should make an advantageous marriage. But the latter knew that her income was very welcome to her aunt and, with a spirit of self-sacrifice not usual in the young, gave up a gay, fashionable life for the dull existence of a paying drudge in the house of an ungrateful, embittered elderly spinster. Yet her heart rejoiced when she conscientiously felt that her brother needed her more and had a greater claim upon her; and gladly she went to keep house for him in India.

And she was happier than he in their new life. For in this land that is essentially a soldier’s country, won by the sword, held by the sword, in spite of all that ignorant demagogues in England may say, Fred Daleham felt all the more keenly the disappointment of his inability to follow the career that he would have chosen. However, he was a healthy-minded young man, not given to brooding and vain regrets.

“Are you ready to start, dear?” he said to his sister now. “Shall I order the ponies?”

“I am ready. But have you finished your coffee?”

“Thanks, yes. We’ll go off at once then, for I have a long morning’s work, and we had better get our ride over while it’s cool.”

He shouted to his “boy” to order the syces, or grooms, to bring the ponies.

“Where are we going today, dear?” asked the girl, putting on her pith helmet.

“To the nursery first. I want to see if the young plants have suffered much from that hailstorm yesterday.”

“Wasn’t it awful? What would people in England say if they got hailstones like that on their heads?”

“Chunerbutty and I measured one that I picked up outside the withering shed,” said the brother. “It was a solid lump of clear ice two inches long and one and a half broad.”

“I couldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen them,” observed the girl. “I wonder that everyone who is caught out in such a storm is not killed.”

“Animals often are—and men, too, for that matter,” replied Daleham. Noreen tapped her smart little riding-boot with her whip.

“I’m glad we’re going out to the nursery,” she said. “It’s my favourite ride.”

“I know it is, but I don’t like taking you there, Sis,” replied her brother. “I always funk that short cut through the bit of jungle to it. I never feel sure that we won’t meet a wild elephant in it.”

“Oh; but I don’t believe they are dangerous; and I do love the ride through that exquisite patch of forest. The trees look so lovely, now that the orchids on them are in flower.”

“My dear girl, get that silly idea that elephants are not dangerous out of your head,” said Daleham decidedly. “You ask any of the fellows.”

“Mr. Parry says they’re not.”

“Old Parr’s never seen any elephant but a tame one, unless it’s a pink or speckled one with a brass tail climbing up the wall of his room when he’s got D.T’s. He never went out shooting in the jungle in his life. But you ask Payne or Reynolds or any of the chaps on the other gardens who know anything of the jungle.”

The girl was unwilling to believe that her beloved forest could prove perilous to her, and she feared lest her excursions into it should be forbidden.

“Well, perhaps a rogue might be dangerous,” she admitted grudgingly. “But I don’t believe that even a rogue would attack you unprovoked.”

“Wouldn’t it? From all I’ve heard about them I’d be very sorry to give one of them the chance,” said her brother. “I’d almost like you to meet one, just to teach you not to be such a cocksure young woman. Lord! wouldn’t I laugh to see you trying to climb a tree—that is, if I were safe up one myself!”

The arrival of the ponies cut short the discussion. Daleham swung his sister up into the saddle of her smart little countrybred and mounted his own waler.

Out along the road through the estate they trotted in the cool northerly breeze that swept down from the mountains and tempered the sun’s heat. The panorama of the Himalayas was glorious, although Kinchinjunga had now drawn up his covering of clouds over his face and the Snows had disappeared. The long orderly lines of tea-bushes were dotted here and there with splashes of colour from the bright-hued puggris, or turbans, of the men and the saris and petticoats of the female coolies, who were busy among the plants, pruning them or tending their wounds after the storm.

The brother and sister quickened their pace and, racing along the soft earthern road, soon reached the patch of forest that intervened between the garden and the nursery.

“I say, Noreen, I think we’d better go the long way round,” said Daleham apprehensively, as he pulled up his waler.

“Oh, no, Fred. Don’t funk it. Do come on,” urged the girl. “If you don’t, I’ll go on by myself and meet you at the nursery.”

The dispute was a daily occurrence and always ended in the man weakly giving in.

“That’s a dear boy,” said his sister consolingly, when she had gained her point.

“Yes, that’s all very well,” grumbled the brother. “You’ve got your own way, as usual. I hope you won’t have cause to regret it one day.”

“Don’t be silly, dear. Come on!” she replied, touching her pony with the whip. The animal seemed to dislike entering the forest as much as the man did. “Oh, do go on, Kitty. Don’t be tiresome.”

The pony balked, but finally gave way under protest, and they rode on into the jungle. A bridle path wound through the undergrowth and between the trees, and this they followed.

It was easy to understand the girl’s enthusiasm and desire to be in the forest. After the tameness of the tea-garden the wild beauty of the giant trees, their huge limbs clothed in the green leaves and drooping trails of blossoms of the orchids, the tangled pattern of the interlaced creepers, the flower-decked bushes and the high ferns, looked all the lovelier in their untrammelled profusion.

The nursery was visited and the damage done to the young plants inspected. Then they turned their ponies’ heads towards home and went back through the strip of jungle. They rode over the whole estate, including the untidy ramshackle village of bamboo and palm-thatched huts of the garden coolies, where the little, naked, brown babies rushed out to salaam and smile at their friend Noreen.

As they came in sight of the ugly buildings of the engine and drying-houses with their corrugated iron roofs and rusty stove-pipe chimneys, Daleham said:

“Look here, old girl, while I go to the factory, you’d better hurry on and see to the drinks and things we’ve got to send to the club. I hope you haven’t forgotten that it’s our day to be ‘at home’ there.”

“Of course I haven’t, Fred. Is it likely?” exclaimed the justly-indignant housewife. “Long before you were awake I helped the cook to pack the cold meat and sweets and cakes, and they went off before we left the bungalow.”

They were referring to a custom that obtains in the colonies of tea-planters who are scattered in ones, two, and threes on widely-separated estates. Their one chance of meeting others of their colour is at the weekly gathering in the so-called club of the district. This is very unlike the institutions known by that name to dwellers in civilised cities. No marble or granite palace is it, but a rough wooden shed with one or two rooms built out in the forest far from human habitations, but in a spot as central and equi-distant to all the planters of the district as possible. A few tennis courts are made beside it, or perhaps a stretch of jungle is cleared, the more obtrusive roots grubbed up, and the result is called a polo-ground, and on it the game is played fast and furiously.

A certain day in the week is selected as the one which the planters from the gardens for ten or twenty miles around will come together to it. Across rivers, through forest, jungle, and peril of wild beasts they journey on their ponies to meet their fellow men. Some of them may not have seen another white face since the last weekly gathering.

Each of them in turn acts as host. By lumbering bullock-cart or on the heads of coolies he sends in charge of his servants to the club-house miles away from his bungalow food and drink, crockery, cutlery, and glasses, for the entertainment of all who will foregather there.

And for a few crowded hours this lonely spot in the jungle is filled with the sound of human voices, with laughter, friendliness, and good fellowship. Men who have been isolated for a week rub off the cobwebs, lunch, play tennis, polo, and cards, and swap stories at the bar until the declining sun warns them of the necessity for departing before night falls on the forest. After hearty farewells they swing themselves up into the saddle again and dash off at breakneck speed to escape being trapped by the darkness.

Many and strange are the adventures that befall them on the rough roads or in the trackless wilds. Sometimes an elephant, a bear, or a tiger confronts them on their way. But the intrepid planter, and his not less courageous women-folk, if he has any to accompany him, gallops fearlessly by it or, perhaps, rides unarmed at the astonished beast and scares it by wild cries. Then on again to another week of lonely labour.