Chapter 41 - Page 2

consequence have salutes that run higher
and higher, gun by gun,--oh, clear away up to eleven; possibly more, but
I did not hear of any above eleven-gun princes. I was told that when a
four-gun prince gets a gun added, he is pretty troublesome for a while,
till the novelty wears off, for he likes the music, and keeps hunting up
pretexts to get himself saluted. It may be that supremely grand folk,
like the Nyzam of Hyderabad and the Gaikwar of Baroda, have more than
eleven guns, but I don't know.

When we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the ground floor was
already about full, and carriages were still flowing into the grounds.
The company present made a fine show, an exhibition of human fireworks,
so to speak, in the matters of costume and comminglings of brilliant
color. The variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was
remarkable. We were told that the explanation of this was, that this
Jain delegation was drawn from many parts of India, and that each man
wore the turban that was in vogue in his own region. This diversity of
turbans made a beautiful effect.

I could have wished to start a rival exhibition there, of Christian hats
and clothes. I would have cleared one side of the room of its Indian
splendors and repacked the space with Christians drawn from America,
England, and the Colonies, dressed in the hats and habits of now, and of
twenty and forty and fifty years ago. It would have been a hideous
exhibition, a thoroughly devilish spectacle. Then there would have been
the added disadvantage of the white complexion. It is not an unbearably
unpleasant complexion when it keeps to itself, but when it comes into
competition with masses of brown and black the fact is betrayed that it
is endurable only because we are used to it. Nearly all black and brown
skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare. How rare, one
may learn by walking down a street in Paris, New York, or London on a
week-day particularly an unfashionable street--and keeping count of the
satisfactory complexions encountered in the course of a mile. Where dark
complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out,
unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. I could notice this as a
boy, down South in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black
satin skin of the South African Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very
close to perfection. I can see those Zulus yet--'ricksha athletes
waiting in front of the hotel for custom; handsome and intensely black
creatures, moderately clothed in loose summer stuffs whose snowy
whiteness made the black all the blacker by contrast. Keeping that group
in my mind, I can compare those complexions with the white ones which are
streaming past this London window