Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People

  GEORGIE PORGIE

  [Footnote: Copyright, 1891, by MACMILLAN & Co.]

  Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry. When the girls came out to play Georgie Porgie ran away.

  If you will admit that a man has no right to enter his drawing-roomearly in the morning, when the housemaid is setting things right andclearing away the dust, you will concede that civilised people who eatout of china and own card-cases have no right to apply their standardof right and wrong to an unsettled land. When the place is made fit fortheir reception, by those men who are told off to the work, they cancome up, bringing in their trunks their own society and the Decalogue,and all the other apparatus. Where the Queen's Law does not carry, itis irrational to expect an observance of other and weaker rules. The menwho run ahead of the cars of Decency and Propriety, and make the jungleways straight, cannot be judged in the same manner as the stay-at-homefolk of the ranks of the regular Tchin.

  Not many months ago the Queen's Law stopped a few miles north ofThayetmyo on the Irrawaddy. There was no very strong Public Opinion upto that limit, but it existed to keep men in order. When the Governmentsaid that the Queen's Law must carry up to Bhamo and the Chinese borderthe order was given, and some men whose desire was to be ever a littlein advance of the rush of Respectability flocked forward with thetroops. These were the men who could never pass examinations, andwould have been too pronounced in their ideas for the administration ofbureau-worked Provinces. The Supreme Government stepped in as soon asmight be, with codes and regulations, and all but reduced New Burma tothe dead Indian level; but there was a short time during which strongmen were necessary and ploughed a field for themselves.

  Among the fore-runners of Civilisation was Georgie Porgie, reckoned byall who knew him a strong man. He held an appointment in Lower Burmawhen the order came to break the Frontier, and his friends called himGeorgie Porgie because of the singularly Burmese-like manner in whichhe sang a song whose first line is something like the words 'GeorgiePorgie.' Most men who have been in Burma will know the song. It means:'Puff, puff, puff, puff, great steamboat!' Georgie sang it to his banjo,and his friends shouted with delight, so that you could hear them faraway in the teak-forest.

  When he went to Upper Burma he had no special regard for God or Man,but he knew how to make himself respected, and to carry out the mixedMilitary-Civil duties that fell to most men's share in those months. Hedid his office work and entertained, now and again, the detachments offever-shaken soldiers who blundered through his part of the world insearch of a flying party of dacoits. Sometimes he turned out and dresseddown dacoits on his own account; for the country was still smoulderingand would blaze when least expected. He enjoyed these charivaris, butthe dacoits were not so amused. All the officials who came in contactwith him departed with the idea that Georgie Porgie was a valuableperson, well able to take care of himself, and, on that belief, he wasleft to his own devices.

  At the end of a few months he wearied of his solitude, and cast aboutfor company and refinement. The Queen's Law had hardly begun to be feltin the country, and Public Opinion, which is more powerful than theQueen's Law, had yet to come. Also, there was a custom in the countrywhich allowed a white man to take to himself a wife of the Daughters ofHeth upon due payment. The marriage was not quite so binding as is thenikkah ceremony among Mahomedans, but the wife was very pleasant.

  When all our troops are back from Burma there will be a proverb in theirmouths, 'As thrifty as a Burmese wife,' and pretty English ladies willwonder what in the world it means.

  The headman of the village next to Georgie Porgie's post had a fairdaughter who had seen Georgie Porgie and loved him from afar. When newswent abroad that the Englishman with the heavy hand who lived inthe stockade was looking for a housekeeper, the headman came in andexplained that, for five hundred rupees down, he would entrust hisdaughter to Georgie Porgie's keeping, to be maintained in all honour,respect, and comfort, with pretty dresses, according to the custom ofthe country. This thing was done, and Georgie Porgie never repented it.

  He found his rough-and-tumble house put straight and made comfortable,his hitherto unchecked expenses cut down by one half, and himself pettedand made much of by his new acquisition, who sat at the head of histable and sang songs to him and ordered his Madrassee servants about,and was in every way as sweet and merry and honest and winning a littlewoman as the most exacting of bachelors could have desired. No race, mensay who know, produces such good wives and heads of households asthe Burmese. When the next detachment tramped by on the war-path theSubaltern in Command found at Georgie Porgie's table a hostess to bedeferential to, a woman to be treated in every way as one occupyingan assured position. When he gathered his men together next dawn andreplunged into the jungle he thought regretfully of the nice littledinner and the pretty face, and envied Georgie Porgie from the bottomof his heart. Yet HE was engaged to a girl at Home, and that is how somemen are constructed.

  The Burmese girl's name was not a pretty one; but as she was promptlychristened Georgina by Georgie Porgie, the blemish did not matter.Georgie Porgie thought well of the petting and the general comfort, andvowed that he had never spent five hundred rupees to a better end.

  After three months of domestic life, a great idea struck him.Matrimony--English matrimony--could not be such a bad thing after all.If he were so thoroughly comfortable at the Back of Beyond with thisBurmese girl who smoked cheroots, how much more comfortable would he bewith a sweet English maiden who would not smoke cheroots, and would playupon a piano instead of a banjo? Also he had a desire to return tohis kind, to hear a Band once more, and to feel how it felt to wear adress-suit again. Decidedly, Matrimony would be a very good thing. Hethought the matter out at length of evenings, while Georgina sangto him, or asked him why he was so silent, and whether she had doneanything to offend him. As he thought, he smoked, and as he smoked helooked at Georgina, and in his fancy turned her into a fair, thrifty,amusing, merry, little English girl, with hair coming low down on herforehead, and perhaps a cigarette between her lips. Certainly, not abig, thick, Burma cheroot, of the brand that Georgina smoked. He wouldwed a girl with Georgina's eyes and most of her ways. But not all. Shecould be improved upon. Then he blew thick smoke-wreaths through hisnostrils and stretched himself. He would taste marriage. Georgina hadhelped him to save money, and there were six months' leave due to him.

  'See here, little woman,' he said, 'we must put by more money for thesenext three months. I want it.' That was a direct slur on Georgina'shousekeeping; for she prided herself on her thrift; but since her Godwanted money she would do her best.

  'You want money?' she said with a little laugh. 'I HAVE money. Look!'She ran to her own room and fetched out a small bag of rupees. 'Of allthat you give me, I keep back some. See! One hundred and seven rupees.Can you want more money than that? Take it. It is my pleasure if you useit.' She spread out the money on the table and pushed it towards him,with her quick, little, pale yellow fingers.

  Georgie Porgie never referred to economy in the household again.

  Three months later, after the dispatch and receipt of several mysteriousletters which Georgina could not understand, and hated for that reason,Georgie Porgie said that he was going away and she must return to herfather's house and stay there.

  Georgina wept. She would go with her God from the world's end to theworld's end. Why should she leave him? She loved him.

  'I am only going to Rangoon,' said Georgie Porgie. 'I shall be back ina month, but it is safer to stay with your father. I will leave you twohundred rupees.'

  'If you go for a month, what need of two hundred? Fifty are more thanenough. There is some evil here. Do not go, or at least let me go withyou.'

  Georgie Porgie does not like to remember that scene even at this date.In the end he got rid of Georgina by a compromise of seventy-fiverupees. She would not take more. Then he went by steamer and rail toRangoon.

  The mysterious letters had granted him six m
onths' leave. The actualflight and an idea that he might have been treacherous hurt severelyat the time, but as soon as the big steamer was well out into the blue,things were easier, and Georgina's face, and the queer little stockadedhouse, and the memory of the rushes of shouting dacoits by night, thecry and struggle of the first man that he had ever killed with his ownhand, and a hundred other more intimate things, faded and faded out ofGeorgie Porgie's heart, and the vision of approaching England took itsplace. The steamer was full of men on leave, all rampantly jovial soulswho had shaken off the dust and sweat of Upper Burma and were as merryas schoolboys. They helped Georgie Porgie to forget.

  Then came England with its luxuries and decencies and comforts, andGeorgie Porgie walked in a pleasant dream upon pavements of which he hadnearly forgotten the ring, wondering why men in their senses ever leftTown. He accepted his keen delight in his furlough as the reward ofhis services. Providence further arranged for him another and greaterdelight--all the pleasures of a quiet English wooing, quite differentfrom the brazen businesses of the East, when half the communitystand back and bet on the result, and the other half wonder what Mrs.So-and-So will say to it.

  It was a pleasant girl and a perfect summer, and a big country-housenear Petworth where there are acres and acres of purple heather andhigh-grassed water-meadows to wander through. Georgie Porgie felt thathe had at last found something worth the living for, and naturallyassumed that the next thing to do was to ask the girl to share his lifein India. She, in her ignorance, was willing to go. On this occasionthere was no bartering with a village headman. There was a finemiddle-class wedding in the country, with a stout Papa and a weepingMamma, and a best-man in purple and fine linen, and six snub-nosed girlsfrom the Sunday School to throw roses on the path between the tombstonesup to the Church door. The local paper described the affair at greatlength, even down to giving the hymns in full. But that was because theDirection were starving for want of material.

  Then came a honeymoon at Arundel, and the Mamma wept copiously beforeshe allowed her one daughter to sail away to India under the care ofGeorgie Porgie the Bridegroom. Beyond any question, Georgie Porgie wasimmensely fond of his wife, and she was devoted to him as the best andgreatest man in the world. When he reported himself at Bombay he feltjustified in demanding a good station for his wife's sake; and, becausehe had made a little mark in Burma and was beginning to be appreciated,they allowed him nearly all that he asked for, and posted him to astation which we will call Sutrain. It stood upon several hills, and wasstyled officially a 'Sanitarium,' for the good reason that the drainagewas utterly neglected. Here Georgie Porgie settled down, and foundmarried life come very naturally to him. He did not rave, as do manybridegrooms, over the strangeness and delight of seeing his own truelove sitting down to breakfast with him every morning 'as though it werethe most natural thing in the world.'

  'He had been there before,' as the Americans say, and, checking themerits of his own present Grace by those of Georgina, he was more andmore inclined to think that he had done well.

  But there was no peace or comfort across the Bay of Bengal, under theteak-trees where Georgina lived with her father, waiting for GeorgiePorgie to return. The headman was old, and remembered the war of '51.He had been to Rangoon, and knew something of the ways of the Kullahs.Sitting in front of his door in the evenings, he taught Georgina a dryphilosophy which did not console her in the least.

  The trouble was that she loved Georgie Porgie just as much as the Frenchgirl in the English History books loved the priest whose head was brokenby the king's bullies. One day she disappeared from the village withall the rupees that Georgie Porgie had given her, and a very smallsmattering of English--also gained from Georgie Porgie.

  The headman was angry at first, but lit a fresh cheroot and saidsomething uncomplimentary about the sex in general. Georgina had startedon a search for Georgie Porgie, who might be in Rangoon, or across theBlack Water, or dead, for aught that she knew. Chance favoured her. Anold Sikh policeman told her that Georgie Porgie had crossed the BlackWater. She took a steerage-passage from Rangoon and went to Calcutta;keeping the secret of her search to herself.

  In India every trace of her was lost for six weeks, and no one knowswhat trouble of heart she must have undergone.

  She reappeared, four hundred miles north of Calcutta, steadily headingnorthwards, very worn and haggard, but very fixed in her determinationto find Georgie Porgie. She could not understand the language of thepeople; but India is infinitely charitable, and the women-folk alongthe Grand Trunk gave her food. Something made her believe that GeorgiePorgie was to be found at the end of that pitiless road. She may haveseen a sepoy who knew him in Burma, but of this no one can be certain.At last, she found a regiment on the line of march, and met there oneof the many subalterns whom Georgie Porgie had invited to dinner in thefar-off, old days of the dacoit-hunting. There was a certain amount ofamusement among the tents when Georgina threw herself at the man's feetand began to cry. There was no amusement when her story was told; buta collection was made, and that was more to the point. One of thesubalterns knew of Georgie Porgie's whereabouts, but not of hismarriage. So he told Georgina and she went her way joyfully to thenorth, in a railway carriage where there was rest for tired feet andshade for a dusty little head. The marches from the train through thehills into Sutrain were trying, but Georgina had money, and familiesjourneying in bullock-carts gave her help. It was an almost miraculousjourney, and Georgina felt sure that the good spirits of Burma werelooking after her. The hill-road to Sutrain is a chilly stretch, andGeorgina caught a bad cold. Still there was Georgie Porgie at the end ofall the trouble to take her up in his arms and pet her, as he used todo in the old days when the stockade was shut for the night and hehad approved of the evening meal. Georgina went forward as fast as shecould; and her good spirits did her one last favour.

  An Englishman stopped her, in the twilight, just at the turn of the roadinto Sutrain, saying, 'Good Heavens! What are you doing here?'

  He was Gillis, the man who had been Georgie Porgie's assistant in UpperBurma, and who occupied the next post to Georgie Porgie's in the jungle.Georgie Porgie had applied to have him to work with at Sutrain becausehe liked him.

  'I have come,' said Georgina simply. 'It was such a long way, and I havebeen months in coming. Where is his house?'

  Gillis gasped. He had seen enough of Georgina in the old times to knowthat explanations would be useless. You cannot explain things to theOriental. You must show.

  'I'll take you there,' said Gillis, and he led Georgina off the road, upthe cliff, by a little pathway, to the back of a house set on a platformcut into the hillside.

  The lamps were just lit, but the curtains were not drawn. 'Now look,'said Gillis, stopping in front of the drawing-room window. Georginalooked and saw Georgie Porgie and the Bride.

  She put her hand up to her hair, which had come out of its top-knotand was straggling about her face. She tried to set her ragged dress inorder, but the dress was past pulling straight, and she coughed a queerlittle cough, for she really had taken a very bad cold. Gillis looked,too, but while Georgina only looked at the Bride once, turning her eyesalways on Georgie Porgie, Gillis looked at the Bride all the time.

  'What are you going to do?' said Gillis, who held Georgina by the wrist,in case of any unexpected rush into the lamplight. 'Will you go in andtell that English woman that you lived with her husband?'

  'No,' said Georgina faintly. 'Let me go. I am going away. I swear that Iam going away.' She twisted herself free and ran off into the dark.

  'Poor little beast!' said Gillis, dropping on to the main road. 'I'dha' given her something to get back to Burma with. What a narrow shavethough! And that angel would never have forgiven it.'

  This seems to prove that the devotion of Gillis was not entirely due tohis affection for Georgie Porgie.

  The Bride and the Bridegroom came out into the verandah after dinner, inorder that the smoke of Georgie Porgie's cheroots might not hang in then
ew drawing-room curtains.

  'What is that noise down there?' said the Bride. Both listened.

  'Oh,' said Georgie Porgie, 'I suppose some brute of a hillman has beenbeating his wife.'

  'Beating--his--wife! How ghastly!' said the Bride. 'Fancy YOUR beatingME!' She slipped an arm round her husband's waist, and, leaning her headagainst his shoulder, looked out across the cloud-filled valley in deepcontent and security.

  But it was Georgina crying, all by herself, down the hillside, among thestones of the water-course where the washermen wash the clothes.