how strange we english seem in india, a little scattered garrison. are we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization through the gates of the east? are we makers or just a means, casually taken up and used by the great forces of god?
i do not know, i have never been able to tell. i have never been able to decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
i think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated.... these are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render the paradox of the english character and this spectacle of a handful of mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? again and again in india i would find myself in little circles of the official english,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. and then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of deep-lying things, i would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted sheath one had pulled a sword and found it—flame....
i recall one evening i spent at a little station in bengal, between lucknow and delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. the theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. about me were the great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family, officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at hand. behind were english of a more dubious social position, also connected with the sugar refinery, a eurasian family or so, very dressy and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then i think various portuguese and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men, some with their wives. the play, admirably chosen, was that crystallization of liberal victorian snobbery, caste, and i remember there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who played—what is the name of the hero's friend? i forget—had in the haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a rasping prompter would not keep ahead as he ought to have done; the scenery and the make-ups were daubs, and i was filled with amazement that having quite wantonly undertaken to do this thing these people could then do it so slackly. then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me quickened my attention, and i realized the satirical purport of drunken old father eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the plumber. between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as the prosperous victorians conceived it. he was to work hard always at any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." a comforting but misleading doctrine. and here were these people a decade on in the twentieth century, with time, death, and judgment close upon them, still eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this one-sided, ungracious, old-fashioned nonsense, that has done so much to intensify the deepening class antagonisms that strain us now at home almost to the breaking point!
how amazingly, it seemed, those people didn't understand and wouldn't understand any class but their own, any race but their own, any usage other than their use! covertly i surveyed the colonel's profile. it expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous interpretations. what a weather-worn thought-free face that grizzled veteran showed the world!
i was seized with a sudden curiosity to see how the private soldiers behind me were taking old eccles. i turned round to discover cropped heads and faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces, eurasians, inferiors, servants, natives.
then at a sharp edge the glare of our lighting ceased and the canvas walls of our narrow world of illusion opened into a vast blue twilight. at the opening stood two white-clad sikhs, very, very still and attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky darkling down to the flushed red memory—such a short memory it is in india—of a day that had gone for ever.
i remained staring at that for some time.
"isn't old eccles good?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and recalled me to the play....
somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing english, the english of india and switzerland and the riviera and the west end and the public services....
but they are not england, they are not the english reality, which is a thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and wise and adventurous—shakespeare, dickens, newton, darwin, nelson, bacon, shelley—english names every one—like the piercing light of lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.
