THE CALL OF THE EAST.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2355, 23 November 1908, Page 2

THE CALL OF THE EAST.

AN UNFATHOM ABLE FASCINATION.

Most of what, one reads of India gives one the impression that British people who have to live there regard it rather as .a place of exile, and are glad to get away from it. Kipling’s soldier who heard the East “a-callin’ ” had Burma particularly in view, and there was a girl very much in the foreground. But Airs Flora Annie Steel, an authority ,on Anglo-Indian life, tells us that the call'of the East is strangely universal. “Even, the Englishman or Englishwoman who has spent long years of apparently dissatisfied life in India, girding at the climate, girding at the lack of culabove all, at the isolation, the exile, often finds in the end the truth of the saying, that ‘when the East loses the body, it claims the soul.’ Amid the delights, of England —garden, concert, ■picture-gal-lery or plav—the Anglo-Indian feels a sudden pang of regret for “the wide, silent, solitary heat of India.’ AATiy does the East call? It is not the call of gold. The average AngloIndian family in its retirement in England is remarkable ior genteel squalor. Airs Steel -lias profound pity for the” Anglo-Indian in the years of his retirement. After a lifetime of honorable service in a land where he rules, “he has to retire into the absolute slavery which English civilisation imposes on every man or moderate means who his the misfortune to live under rt! Ho itches to administer justice after the old fashion, but has to submit to be ruled by his tradesmen and to live in “a deadly uniformity which is sickening.” But the call of the Last does not wholly come from the power which the ’.East gave ‘him, nor frmn the luxurious side of 111© there. His mind lingers most over the harshness of Eastern life, the proximity of life and death there. The call. of the East is mainly a. call to the imagination of the nation. Mrs bteel wonders if the final account could be made up between England and Inffia, balance between them absolute woS strike. i think I should ior L g land has gained as much as she has given