Colonial memories

I feel as if no sketch, however slight, of my short stay in beautiful Mauritius would be complete without a reference to General Gordon. Soon after our own arrival Colonel Charles Gordon came in command of the small body of Royal Engineers stationed there. From the very first his delightful personality made itself felt, and although I suspect that very few of the island-dwellers had the least idea of what a name to conjure with “Chinese Gordon” was, still he at once assumed that amazing sway over men’s hearts of which he possessed the secret. Looking back on it through all these years I think the wonderful humility of the man is the first thing one realises. He took up his duties and his position in that obscure little corner of the Empire with just as much interest and simplicity as though he had never led armies to victory or changed the fate of nations. I am proud to say we saw a great deal of him, though it had to be on his own terms and in his own way. Of course, he was asked to the large and formal entertainments at Réduit, but he always excused himself, and only came to dine with us when we were quite alone. He would change into the mess uniform, which it was the custom always to wear at Government House, in the carriole which brought him up, and he once gave this as an excuse for the extreme crookedness of his black neck-tie.

On these occasions, which I am happy to say were very frequent, the dinner had to be of the most simple character and compressed into the shortest possible space. I do not remember whether he took wine or not, but he consumed an immense amount of black coffee, not at dinner, but directly after, when we adjourned to the verandah and cigarettes were lighted. Every half-hour a servant brought a fresh cup of fragrant coffee, and noiselessly put it on the little table at Colonel Gordon’s elbow, and this went on for hours! It is impossible to convey in words any idea of the singular charm of Gordon’s conversation. With so appreciative and sympathetic a listener as my dear husband was, he gave of his best and that was very good. Not in the least egotistical, his vivid narratives were the most thrillingly interesting it has ever been my good fortune to listen to. Every word he said, for all its picturesqueness, bore the stamp of reality, and the scenes he described at once stood out before your eyes. A question now and then was all that was needed to sustain the delightful flow of talk. He never uttered a word which could be called “cant,” nor did he bring his religious opinions into prominence. One gathered from his utterances that he was more deeply imbued with the “enthusiasm of humanity” than with any dogma.

His eyes were the most remarkable part of his face, and I cannot imagine any one who has ever seen them forgetting their wonderful beauty. It was not merely that they were of a crystal clearness and as blue as a summer sky, but the expression was different to that of any other human eye I have ever seen. In the first place, instead of the trained, conventional glance with which we habitually regard each other and which, certainly at first, tells you nothing whatever of your new acquaintance’s character or inner nature, Gordon’s beautiful, noble soul looked straight at you, directly from out of these clear eyes. They revealed him at once, as he was, and I am sure the secret of his extraordinary and almost instantaneous influence over his fellow-creatures lay in that glance. There was a sort of wistful tenderness in it for all its penetration, an extraordinary magnetic sympathy, and yet you felt its authority. The rest of his face was rugged, and, I suppose, what would be called plain, but one never thought of anything beyond the soul shining out of those wonderful windows. To look at any other face after his was like looking at a lifeless mask. A few months after he arrived the General commanding the troops in Mauritius left, and Colonel Gordon was promoted and succeeded him. He had been very active among the Chinese mercantile class (a very numerous one) and had done much good, not merely of a missionary but of a social nature, explaining the duties of citizenship to them, and enforcing local laws and rules which they probably had not understood. That part of the community became much easier to manage after he took them in hand.

But there was a strangely unpractical side to General Gordon’s nature, apart from his utter disregard of what might be called his own interests. Those he never thought of for one moment, and I honestly believe that his feelings about the value or importance of money—as money—were on a par with the ideas of a nice child of five years old! Coins of the realm remained but a short time in his pocket, and were only welcome to him as a means of helping others. Still his charity was not at all indiscriminate, and in the numerous instances of which I knew his help was always judiciously given.

Curiously enough, the scheme of defence for Mauritius, which General Gordon was requested officially to draw up, was found to be absolutely impossible. He bestowed much pains and care on it, but his plans involved many alterations and changes not one of which were found practicable. I have in my possession some charming letters of his to my husband, who had written privately to the General to state that in forwarding this scheme of defence to the War Office, he, as Lieutenant-Governor, had felt obliged to disagree entirely with it, and to point out the utter impossibility on every ground of carrying it out. Now my husband was one of General Gordon’s warmest and most discriminating admirers, and he showed me the private correspondence on the subject as illustrating the noble and beautiful nature of the man. There was not the slightest trace of annoyance or even pique at the uncompromising terms in which a civilian Governor had felt it his duty to differ from so eminent a military authority. The General just recognised that it was a plain expression of an honest opinion and respected it accordingly, nor was there the slightest friction between them nor the least check upon their friendly intercourse.

I remember particularly one merry evening in the verandah after dinner, when the General had just returned from an official visit to the Seychelles, a little group of islands nearly 1000 miles from Mauritius, but in those days one of its dépendences. He was full of a brand new theory, based on the coco-de-mer, a gigantic palm which he saw for the first time, and which convinced him that he had discovered the site of the Garden of Eden. He explained with great eagerness how he felt sure of the existence of the four encircling rivers of that favoured spot (only they now ran underground), but his strong point was the strange weird fruit which hung, some eighty feet or so above the ground, from those splendid palms which are peculiar to the Seychelles group. In vain the Governor pointed out, with much laughter, that our first parents must have been of a goodly height to reach this fruit, and in the next, that it was not good to eat!

The dear General bore all our chaff with the sweetest good-humour, but remained as firmly fixed as ever in his idea. He was most eager and earnest about it all, and, though he found our laughter infectious and joined heartily in it, nothing made the least impression on him, and I believe he always thought the Garden of Eden had once united that little group of islets in one exquisite whole—for Mahé is certainly a lovely spot and as fertile as it is fair.

We always felt we could not expect to keep him long with us in Mauritius though he never chafed nor repined in any way, and just did his duty from day to day, and whatever other work for his fellow-men his hand found to do, with all his might. But all too soon he was summoned home, and quite the next thing we heard of him was that he was going out to India with the new Governor-General, Lord Ripon, as his Private Secretary. We all exclaimed at once, “Think of the dinner-parties!” and were not at all surprised to hear how short a time that arrangement had lasted, though the dreaded form of entertainment had really nothing whatever to do with Gordon’s resignation of his post long before India was reached. From time to time he wrote to my husband, and we followed every step of his subsequent career with the deepest interest. I have since heard, I do not know with what truth, that it was a mistake in a telegram which prevented his going to the Congo on King Leopold’s business instead of to Egypt on ours. However that may be, the rest of the story was quite in harmony with what one had known of him, but of all those who sorrowed for his tragic fate—and it was a nation that grieved—no one lamented him more than his official chief of the Mauritian days.