MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN.
MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN.
MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN.
MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN.
CHAPTER I.
Pleasant days of my Griffinhood!—green oasis of life’s desert waste!—thoughtless, joyous, happy season, when young Hope told “her flattering tale,” and novelty broke sweetly upon a heart unsated by the world, with what fond and regretful emotions do I now look back upon you through the long, dim, dreary vista of five-and-twenty years!
But I think I hear a raw reader exclaim, “Griffins!—are there griffins in the East?” “Assuredly, sir. Did you never hear of the law of Zoroaster quoted inZadig, by which griffins’ flesh is prohibited to be eaten? Griffins are so common at the different presidencies of India that nobody looks at them, and most of these animals are very tame.” I will not, however, abuse the traveller’s privilege.
Griffin, or more familiarly aGriff, is an Anglo-Indian cant term applied to all new-comers, whose lot has been cast in the “gorgeous East.” Whether the appellation has any connection with the fabulous compound, the gryps or gryphon of armorial blazoning, is a point which I feel myself incompetent to decide.[2]A griffin is the Johnny Newcome of the East, one whose European manners and ideas stand out in ludicrousrelief when contrasted with those, so essentially different in most respects, which appertain to the new country of his sojourn. The ordinary period of griffinhood is a year, by which time thenovus homo, if apt, is supposed to have acquired a sufficient familiarity with the language, habits, customs, and manners of the country, both Anglo-Indian and Native, so as to preclude his making himself supremely ridiculous by blunders,gaucheries, and the indiscriminate application of English standards to states of things to which those rules are not always exactly adapted. To illustrate by example:—a good-natured Englishman, who should present a Brahmin who worships the cow with a bottle of beef-steak sauce, would be decidedly “griffinish,” particularly if he could be made acquainted with the nature of the gift; nevertheless, beef steak,per se, is an excellent thing in an Englishman’s estimation, and a better still with the addition of the before-mentioned condiment. But to return to our subject.
At the termination, then, of the above-mentioned period, our griffin, if he has made the most of his time, becomes entitled to associate on pretty equal terms with those sun-dried specimens of thegenus homo, familiarly called the “old hands:”—subs of fifteen years’ standing; grey-headed captains, and superannuated majors, critics profound in the merits of a curry, or the quality of a batch of Hodgson’s pale ale. He ceases to be the butt of his regiment, and persecutes in his turn, with the zeal of a convert, all novices not blessed with his modicum of local experience.
Youth is proverbially of a plastic nature, and the juvenile griffin, consequently, in the majority of instances, readily accommodates himself to the altered circumstances in which he is placed; but not so the man of mature years, to whose moral and physical organization forty or fifty winters have imparted their rigid and unmalleable influences. Griffins of this description, which commonly comprises bishops, judges, commanders-in-chief, andgentlemen sent out on special missions, &c., protract their griffinage commonly during the whole period of their stay in the country, and never acquire the peculiar knowledge which entitles them to rank with the initiated. The late most excellent Bishop Heber, for example, who to the virtues of a Christian added all the qualities which could adorn the scholar and gentleman, was nevertheless an egregious griffin, as a perusal of his delightful travels in India, written in all the singleness of his benevolent heart, must convince any one acquainted with the character of the country and the natives of India.
Autobiographers love to beginab ovo, and I see no reason why I should wholly deviate from a custom doubly sanctioned by reason and established usage. It is curious sometimes to trace the gradual development of character in “small” as well as in “great” men; to note the little incidents which often determine the nature of our future career, and describe the shootings of the young idea at that vernal season when they first begin to expand into trees of good or evil. In an old manor-house, not thirty miles from London, on a gloomy November day, I first saw the light. Of the home of my infancy I remember little but my nursery, a long, bare, whitewashed apartment, with a tall, diamond-paned window, half obscured by the funereal branches of a venerable yew-tree. This window looked out, I remember, on the village churchyard, thickly studded with the moss-grown memorials of successive generations. In that window-seat I used to sit for many a weary hour, watching the boys idling on the gravestones, the jackdaws wheeling their airy circles round the spire, or the parson’s old one-eyed horse cropping the rank herbage, which sprouted fresh and green above the silent dust of many a “village Hampden.” The recollections of infancy, like an old picture, become often dim and obscure, but here and there particular events, like bright lights and rich Rembrandt touches, remain deeply impressed, which seem to defy the effects of time; of this kind is a most vivid recollection I have ofa venerable uncle of my mother’s, an old Indian, who lived with us, and whose knee I always sought when I could give nurse the slip. My great uncle Frank always welcomed me to his littlesanctumin the green parlour, and having quite an Arab’s notion of the sacred rights of hospitality, invariably refused to give me up when nurse, puffing and foaming, would waddle in to reclaim me. I shall never forget the delight I derived from his pleasant stories and the white sugar-candy, of which he always kept a stock on hand. Good old man! he died full of years, and was the first of a long series of friends whose loss I have had to lament.
My father was, truly, that character emphatically styled “an Irish gentleman,” in whom the suavity of the Frenchman was combined with much of the fire and brilliancy of his native land. Though of an ancient family, his fortune, derived from an estate in the sister kingdom, was very limited, the “dirty acres” having somehow or other, from generation to generation, become “small by degrees, and beautifully less.” He was of a tender frame, and of that delicate, sensitive, nervous temperament, which, though often the attendant on genius, which he unquestionably possessed, little fits those so constituted to buffet with the world, or long to endure its storms. He died in the prime of manhood, when I was very young, and left my mother to struggle with those difficulties which are always incident to a state of widowhood, with a numerous family and a limited income. The deficiency of fortune was, however, in her case, compensated by the energies of a masculine understanding, combined with an untiring devotion to the interest and welfare of her children.
Trades and professions in England are almost as completely hereditary as among the castes of India. The great Franklin derived his “ponderous strength,” physical if not intellectual, from a line of Blacksmiths, and I, Frank Gernon, inherit certain atrabilious humours, maternally, from a long series of very respectable “QuiHyes.”[3]Yes, my mothers family—father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins—had all served with exemplary fidelity that potent merchant-monarch affectionately termed in India the Honourable John (though degraded, I am sorry to say, into an “old woman” by his native subjects); they had all flourished for more than a century under the shade of the “rupee tree,” a plant of Hesperidean virtues, whose fructiferous powers, alas! have since their time sadly declined. These, my maternal progenitors, were men both of the sword and pen; some had filled high civil stations with credit, whilst others, under the banners of a Clive, a Lawrence, or a Munro, had led “Ind’s dusky chivalry” to war, and participated in many of those glorious, but now time-mellowed exploits, from which the splendid fabric of our Eastern dominions has arisen. This, and other circumstances on which I shall briefly touch, combined to point my destiny to the gorgeous East. My mother, for the reasons given, and the peculiar facilities which she consequently had for establishing us in that quarter, had from an early period looked fondly to India as the theatre for the future exertions of her sons. But long before the period of my departure arrived—indeed I may say almost from infancy—I had been inoculated by my mother, my great uncle, and sundry parchment-faced gentlemen who frequented our house, with a sort of Indo-mania. I was never tired of hearing of its people, their manners, dress, &c., and was perfectly read on the subject of alligators and Bengal tigers. I used, indeed, regularly and systematically to persecute and bore every Anglo-Indian that came in my way for authentic accounts of their history and mode of destruction, &c. One most benevolent old gentleman, a fine specimen of the Indian of other days, and a particular friend of my family, used to “fool us to the top of our bent” in that way. I say us, for the Indo-mania was not confined to myself.
My mother, too, used to entertain us with her experiences, which served to feed the ardent longing which I felt to visit the East. How often in the winter evenings of pleasant “lang syne,” when the urn hissed on the table, and the cat purred on the comfortable rug, has our then happy domestic circle listened with delight to her account of that far-distant land! What respect did the sonorous names of Bangalore and Cuddalore, and Nundy Droog and Severn Droog, and Hookhaburdar and Soontaburdars, and a host of others, excite in our young minds! In what happy accordance with school-boy thoughts were the descriptions she gave us of the fruits of that sunny clime—the luscious mango—the huge jack—the refreshing guava—and, above all, the delicious custard-apple, a production which I never in the least doubted contained the exact counterpart of that pleasant admixture of milk and eggs which daily excited my longing eyes amongst the tempting display of a pastry-cook’s window! Sometimes she rose to higher themes, in which the pathetic or adventurous predominated. How my poor cousin Will fell by the dagger of an assassin at the celebrated massacre of Patna; and how another venturous relative shot a tiger on foot, thereby earning the benedictions of a whole community of peaceful Hindoos, whose village had long been the scene of his midnight maraudings: this story, by the way, had a dash of the humorous in it, though relating in the main to a rather serious affair. It never lost its raciness by repetition, and whenever my mother told it, which at our request she frequently did, and approached what we deemed the comic part, our risibles were always on full-cock for a grand and simultaneous explosion of mirth.
Well, time rolled on; I had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, sweet sixteen, and the ocean of life and adventure lay before me. I stood five feet nine inches in my stockings, and possessed all the aspirations common to my age. “Frank, my love,” one day said my mother to me, at the conclusion of breakfast, “Ihave good news for you; that most benevolent of men, Mr. Versanket, has complied with my application, and given me an infantry cadetship for you; here,” she continued, “is his letter, read it, and ever retain, as I trust you will, a lively sense of his goodness.” I eagerly seized the letter, and read the contents with a kind of ecstasy. It expressed sympathy in my mothers difficulties, and an invitation to me to come to London and take advantage of his offer.
I will not dwell on the parting scenes. Suffice it to say, that I embraced those dear objects of my affection, many of whom I was never destined to embrace again, and bid a sorrowful long adieu to the parental roof. I arrived in the great metropolis, and prepared for my outfit and departure. Having completed the former—sheets, ducks, jeans, and gingerbread, tobacco to bribe old Neptune, brandy to mollify the sailors, and allet ceteras, according to the most approved list of Messrs. Welsh and Stalker—nought remained but to pass the India House, an ordeal which I was led to view with an indefinable dread. From whom I received the information I now forget, though it was probably from some one of that mischievous tribe of jokers, who love to sport with the feelings of youth; but I was told that it was absolutely necessary that I should learn by heart, as an indispensable preliminary to passing, the “Articles of War and Mutiny Act,” then forming one volume. What was my state of alarm and despondency as I handled that substantial yellow-backed tome, and reflected on the task I had to perform of committing its whole contents to memory in the brief space of one week! It haunted me in my dreams, and the thought of it, sometimes crossing my mind whilst eating, almost suspended the power of swallowing. I carried it about with me whereever I went, applying to it with desperate determination whenever a leisure moment, of which I had very few, would admit; but what I forced into my sensorium one moment, the eternal noise and racket of London droveout of it the next. To cut a long story short, the day arrived, “the all-important day,” big with my fate. I found myself waiting in the India House, preparatory to appearing before the directors, and, saving the first two or three clauses, the “Articles of War” were to me as a sealed volume. I was in despair; to be disgraced appeared inevitable. At last came the awful summons, and I entered the apartment, where, at a large table covered with green cloth, sat the “potent, grave, and reverend signiors,” who were to decide my fate. One of them, a very benevolent-looking old gentleman, with a powdered head, desired me to advance, and having asked me a few questions touching my name, age, &c., he paused, and, to my inexpressible alarm, took up a volume from the table, which was no other than that accursed piece of military codification of which I have made mention. Now, thought I, it comes, and all is over. After turning over the leaves for some seconds, he said, raising his head, “I suppose you are well acquainted with the contents of this volume?” Heaven forgive me! but the instinct of self-preservation was strong upon me, and I mumbled forth a very suspicious “Yes.” Ye generous casuists, who invent excuses for human frailty, plead for my justification. “Well,” continued he, closing the book, “conduct yourself circumspectly in the situation in which you are about to enter, and you will acquire the approbation of your superiors; you may now retire.” Those who can imagine the feelings of a culprit reprieved, after the fatal knot has been comfortably adjusted by a certain legal functionary; or those of a curate, with £50 per annum, and fifteen small children, on the announcement of a legacy of £10,000; or those of a respectable spinster of forty, on having the question unexpectedly popped; or, in short, any other situation where felicity obtrudes unlooked for, may form some idea of mine; I absolutely walked on air, relieved from this incubus, and gave myself up to the most delightful buoyancy of spirits. A few days more, and Mr. CadetFrancis Gernon found himself on board theRottenbeam Castle, steering down Channel, and with tearful eyes casting a lingering gaze on the shores of old England.