Eleanor and Franklin Read Online Free PDF Page B

talks and walks” with Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days , and agreed to dine with him in London. His partners at whist were “kind enough to wish me to go to Cannes to play whist with themall winter!” And most important to Elliott, Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter and second Gordon Cummings has taken me under his especial wing—given me a dozen letters to India and I breakfast with him next Sunday at twelve and on Monday we buy my guns, etc.”
    From the moment of his arrival in Bombay he was treated like a “grand prince.” He could hardly account for it, he wrote his mother, “for if ever there was a man of few resources and moderate talents I am he, yet all events and people seem to give me the best of times on my holiday visit. . . . I am ‘up’ at the club and have ‘dined,’ ‘Tiffined’ and breakfasted ‘out’ every meal.”
    The officers of His Majesty’s Forces in India, the princes of India, and the Society of the Bombay Club were charmed by this young man from New York and pressed invitations upon him. Nevertheless, he retained a certain critical detachment. He exulted over an intoxicating feast at Sir Sala Jung’s, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, to which they were driven in a cortege that was itself a princely pageant and were escorted into dinner “through long lines of motionless blacks holding flaming torches.” But he also commented, “This is a picture of a native state—under, unwillingly, British protection. England in power—natives high and low discontented.”
    â€œOh! these people,” he wrote en route to Kashmir and the Himalayas,
    what a puzzle to me this world becomes when we find out how many of us are in it. And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?
    He was appalled by the “ocean of misery and degradation” that he found on the subcontinent, such total degradation that it
    might teach our “lovers of men” to know new horrors and sadness that the mortal frames and still more the Immortal Souls of Beings in God’s image made, should be brought so low. The number and existence of these some millions of poor wretches has upset many preconceived notions of mine.
    The journey to Tibet along the Astor Road was shadowed by mishap. In Srinagar he was held over for a week by fever. Impatiently, hepushed on and reached Thuldii in the highest Himalayas, but “that beastly fever” clung to him and he was forced to abandon the expedition and return home without having hunted the ibex and markhor that he had sought.
    India had made him deeply conscious of his lack of education. “How I do crave after knowledge, book learning . . . education and a well-balanced mind,” he exclaimed in the Himalayas as he tried to catch hold of “finer subtleties” of description, history, and analysis. Few Americans had had his opportunity, and he wanted to write about his experiences, which would have made as colorful a book as Theodore’s about the West. He drafted an account of a tiger shoot in Hyderabad and an elephant hunt in Ceylon. The drafts were good, but he did not persist. The manuscripts did not see the light of day until 1933 when they were edited, along with his letters, and published by Eleanor under the title Hunting Big Game in the Ei ghties .
    While the youthful Elliott was disturbed by the way the British held India “in a grip of iron,” the way of life of the British rulers—hunts, polo, racing—suited him quite well. “I am very fond of this life, Bammie,” he wrote at the end of his trip.
    No doubt about it. I thought to rather put a slight stop to my inclinations by a large dose of it, but—for the great drawback that