When you depart, you leave if
you like a little present, merely for a memorial, with your
entertainer; he would be offended if you offered it him openly as a
remuneration, and you give
[p.37]some trifling sums to the servants. Thus you will be welcome
wherever you go. If perchance you are detained perforce in such a
situation,-which may easily happen to you, medical man,-you have only
to make yourself as disagreeable as possible, by calling for all manner
of impossible things. Shame is a passion with Eastern nations. Your
host would blush to point out to you the indecorum of your conduct; and
the laws of hospitality oblige him to supply the every want of a guest,
even though he be a detenu.
But of all Orientals, the most antipathetical companion to an
Englishman is, I believe, an East-Indian. Like the fox in the fable,
fulsomely flattering at first, he gradually becomes easily friendly,
disagreeably familiar, offensively rude, which ends by rousing the
"spirit of the British lion." Nothing delights the Hindi so much as an
opportunity of safely venting the spleen with which he regards his
victors.[FN#11] He will sit in the presence of a
[p.38]magistrate, or an officer, the very picture of cringing
submissiveness. But after leaving the room, he is as different from his
former self as a counsel in court from a counsel at a concert, a sea
captain at a club dinner from a sea captain on his quarter-deck. Then
he will discover that the English are not brave, nor clever, nor
generous, nor civilised, nor anything but surpassing rogues; that every
official takes bribes, that their manners are utterly offensive, and
that they are rank infidels. Then he will descant complacently upon the
probability of a general Bartholomew's Day in the East, and look
forward to the hour when enlightened Young India will arise and drive
the "foul invader" from the land.[FN#12] Then he will submit his
political opinions nakedly, that India should be wrested from the
Company and given to the Queen, or taken from the Queen and given to
the French. If the Indian has been a European traveller, so much the
worse for you. He has blushed to own,-explaining, however , conquest by
bribery,-that 50,000 Englishmen hold 150,000,000 of his compatriots in
thrall, and for aught you know, republicanism may have become his idol.
He has lost all fear of the white face, and having been accustomed to
unburden his mind in
"The land where, girt by friend or foe,
A man may say the thing he will,"-
he pursues the same course in other lands where it is exceedingly
misplaced. His doctrines of liberty and
[p.39]equality he applies to you personally and practically, by not
rising when you enter or leave the room,-at first you could scarcely
induce him to sit down,-by not offering you his pipe, by turning away
when you address him; in fact, by a variety of similar small affronts
which none knows better to manage skilfully and with almost impalpable
gradations.
