"We are not divided, All one body we-- One in hope and doctrine, One in Charity."
When one comes to a new station the first thing to do is to call on the inhabitants. This duty I had neglected, preferring to consort with Chinese till the Sabbath, when I learnt that Singapur went to the Botanical Gardens and listened to secular music.
All the Englishmen in the island congregated there. The Botanical Gardens would have been lovely at Kew, but here, where one knew that they were the only place of recreation open to the inhabitants, they were not pleasant. All the plants of all the tropics grew there together, and the orchid-house was roofed with thin battens of wood--just enough to keep off the direct rays of the sun. It held waxy-white splendours from Manila, the Philippines, and tropical Africa--plants that were half-slugs, drawing nourishment apparently from their own wooden labels; but there was no difference between the temperature of the orchid-house and the open air; both were heavy, dank, and steaming. I would have given a month's pay--but I have no month's pay--for a clear breath of stifling hot wind from the sands of Sirsa, for the darkness of a Punjab dust-storm, in exchange for the perspiring plants, and the tree-fern that sweated audibly.
Just when I was most impressed with my measureless distance from India, my carriage advanced to the sound of slow music, and I found myself in the middle of an Indian station--not quite as big as Allahabad, and infinitely prettier than Lucknow. It overlooked the gardens that sloped in ridge and hollow below; and the barracks were set in much greenery, and there was a mess-house that suggested long and cooling drinks, and there walked round about a British band. It was just We Our Noble Selves. In the centre was the pretty _Memsahib_ with light hair and fascinating manners, and the plump little _Memsahib_ that talks to everybody and is in everybody's confidence, and the spinster fresh from home, and the bean-fed, well-groomed subaltern with the light coat and fox-terrier. On the benches sat the fat colonel, and the large judge, and the engineer's wife, and the merchant-man and his family after their kind--male and female met I them, and but for the little fact that they were entire strangers to me, I would have saluted them all as old friends. I knew what they were talking about, could see them taking stock of one another's dresses out of the corners of their eyes, could see the young men backing and filling across the ground in order to walk with the young maidens, and could hear the "Do you think so's" and "Not really's" of our polite conversation. It is an awful thing to sit in a hired carriage and watch one's own people, and know that though you know their life, you have neither part nor lot in it.
