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Title: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan

Illustrator: F. H. Townsend

Release date: February 6, 2018 [eBook #56513]
                Most recently updated: June 14, 2020

Language: English



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THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB


------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

                               ----------

A SOCIAL DEPARTURE: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by
    Ourselves. With 111 Illustrations by F. H. TOWNSEND. 12mo. Paper, 75
    cents; cloth, $1.75.

“Widely read and praised on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, with
scores of illustrations which fit the text exactly and show the mind of
artist and writer in unison.”—New York Evening Post.

“It is to be doubted whether another book can be found so thoroughly
amusing from beginning to end.”—Boston Daily Advertiser.

“For sparkling wit, irresistibly contagious fun, keen observation,
absolutely poetic appreciation of natural beauty, and vivid
descriptiveness, it has no recent rival.”—Mrs. P. T. BARNUM’S Letter to
the New York Tribune.

“A brighter, merrier, more entirely charming book would be, indeed,
difficult to find.”—St. Louis Republic.


AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON. With 80 Illustrations by F. H. TOWNSEND.
    12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.50.

“One of the most naïve and entertaining books of the season.”—New York
Observer.

“The raciness and breeziness which made ‘A Social Departure,’ by the
same author, last season, the best-read and most-talked-of book of
travel for many a year, permeate the new book, and appear between the
lines of every page.”—Brooklyn Standard-Union.

“So sprightly a book as this, on life in London as observed by an
American, has never before been written.”—Philadelphia Bulletin.

                               ----------

                D. APPLETON & CO., PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


[Illustration: THEY CAME IN LITTLE STRAGGLING STRINGS AND BANDS. P 43.]


THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB

by

SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN

Author of
A Social Departure, An American Girl In London, etc.

With Illustrations by F. H. Townsend


[Illustration:Decoration]





New York
D. Appleton and Company
1893

Copyright, 1893,
by D. Appleton and Company.

Electrotyped and Printed
at the Appleton Press, U. S. A.




------------------------------------------------------------------------




                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

                                -------


            They came in little straggling     Frontispiece
              strings and bands

            Cups of tea                                   3

            Young Browne’s tennis                         5

            Her new field of labour                      15

            Aunt Plovtree                                19

            Initial letter                               24

            Initial letter                               49

            Uncertain whether she ought to               57
              bow

            “It’s just the place for                     63
              centipedes”

            Initial letter                               68

            “A very worthy and                           79
              hard-working sort”

            “What is this?” said Mrs.                    87
              Browne

            Chua                                         94

            An accident disclosed them                   96

            Mr. Sayter                                  136

            Mr. Sayter gave Mrs. Browne                 138
              his arm

            Mrs. Lovitt                                 151

            Initial letter                              156

            The ladies went most securely               159

            Initial letter                              168

            Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P.                    175

            Three others much like himself              187

            A sudden indisposition                      191

            Initial letter                              193

            Their hats                                  210

            Initial letter                              214

            “Halma”                                     222

            Miss Josephine Lovitt                       225

            Initial letter                              234

            Mr. Week slept on a bench                   243

            He stood upon one leg                       252

            Initial letter                              260

            Initial letter                              278

            He asked nothing of the                     282
              Brownes

            The snows                                   291

            “Liver complications—we all                 297
              come to it”

            She has fallen into a way of                309
              crossing her knees in a low
              chair




------------------------------------------------------------------------




                  THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB.


                                -------




                               CHAPTER I.


HELEN FRANCES BROWNE was formerly a Miss Peachey. Not one of the
Devonshire Peacheys—they are quite a different family. This Miss
Peachey’s father was a clergyman, who folded his flock and his family in
the town of Canbury in Wilts, very nice people and well thought of, with
nice, well-thought-of connections, but nothing particularly aristocratic
amongst them, like the Devonshire Peacheys, and no beer.

The former Miss Peachey is now a memsahib of Lower Bengal. As you
probably know, one is not born a memsahib; the dignity is arrived at
later, through circumstances, processes, and sometimes through foresight
on the part of one’s mamma. It is not so easy to obtain as it used to
be. Formerly it was a mere question of facilities for transportation,
and the whole matter was arranged, obviously and without criticism, by
the operation of the law of supply. The necessary six months’ tossing
fortune in a sailing ship made young ladies who were willing to
undertake it scarce and valuable, we hear. We are even given to
understand that the unclaimed remnant, the few standing over to be more
deliberately acquired, after the ball given on board for the
facilitation of these matters the night succeeding the ship’s arrival in
port, were held to have fallen short of what they reasonably might have
expected. But that was fifty years ago. To-day Lower Bengal, in the cold
weather, is gay with potential memsahibs of all degrees of attraction,
in raiment fresh from Oxford Street, in high spirits, in excellent form
for tennis, dancing, riding, and full of a charmed appreciation of the
“picturesqueness” of India.

[Illustration: GOT MIDDLE-AGED LADIES OF WILTSHIRE CUPS OF TEA.]

They come from the East and from the West, and from school in Germany.
They come to make the acquaintance of their Anglo-Indian fathers and
mothers, to teach the Bible and plain sewing in the Zenanas, to stay
with a married sister, to keep house for a brother who is in the
Department of Police. In the hot weather a proportion migrate northward,
to Darjeeling, or Simla, in the Hills, but there are enough in our midst
all the year round to produce a certain coy hesitancy and dalliance on
the part of pretending bachelors, augmented by the consideration of all
that might be done in England in three months’ “Privilege” leave. Young
Browne was an example of this. There was no doubt that young Browne was
tremendously attracted by Miss Pellington—Pellington, Scott & Co., rice
and coolies chiefly, a very old firm—down from the Hills for her second
cold weather, and only beginning to be faintly spoilt, when it so
happened that his furlough fell due. He had fully intended to “do
Switzerland this time,” but Canbury, with tennis every Wednesday
afternoon at the Rectory, and Helen Peachey playing there in blue and
white striped flannel, pink cheeks and a sailor hat, was so much more
interesting than he had expected it to be, that Switzerland was
gradually relegated five years into the future. After tennis there was
always tea in the drawing-room, and Helen, in the pretty flush of her
exertions, poured it out. Just at first, young Browne did not quite know
which he appreciated most, Helen who poured it out, or the neat little
maid in cap and apron who brought it in—it was so long since he had seen
tea brought in by anything feminine in cap and apron; but after a bit
the little maid sank to her proper status of consideration, and Helen
was left supreme. And Helen Peachey’s tennis, for grace and muscularity,
was certainly a thing to see, young Browne thought. She played in
tournaments while he stood by in immaculate whites with an idle racquet,
and got middle-aged ladies of Wiltshire cups of tea; but she was not
puffed up about this, and often condescended to be his partner on the
Rectory lawn against the two younger Misses Peachey. It made the best
sett that way, for young Browne’s tennis fluctuated from indifferent bad
to indifferent worse, and the younger Misses Peachey were vigorous
creatures, and gave Helen all she could do to win with her handicap.

Mr. Browne—we must really get into the way of giving him his title—was
not naturally prone to depression, rather the reverse; but when the two
Misses Peachey came off victorious he used to be quite uncomfortably
gloomy for a time. Once I know, when he had remarked apologetically to
Helen that he hoped she would have a better partner next time, and she
absent-mindedly returned, “I hope so indeed!” his spirits went down with
a run and did not rise again until somebody who overheard, chaffed Helen
about her blunder and produced gentle consternation and a melting appeal
for pardon. That was at a very advanced stage of these young people’s
relations, long after everybody but themselves knew exactly what would
happen, and what did happen in the course of another week. It was a
triviality, it would have had no place in our consideration of the
affairs of a young man and woman who fell in love according to approved
analytical methods, with subtle silent scruples and mysterious
misunderstandings, in the modern way. I introduce it on its merits as a
triviality, to indicate that George William Browne and Helen Frances
Peachey arrived at a point where they considered themselves
indispensable to each other in the most natural, simple, and unimpeded
manner. I will go so far as to say that if Helen had not been there—if
she had spent the summer with an aunt in Hampshire, as was at one time
contemplated—one of the other Misses Peachey might have inspired this
chronicle. But that is risking a good deal, I know, at the hands of the
critics, and especially perhaps at Helen’s. After all, what I want to
state is merely the felicitous engagement, in July of a recent year, of
Mr. Browne and Miss Peachey. Two tender months later, Mr. Browne sailed
for India again, with a joyful conviction that he had done well to come
home, that somewhat modified his natural grief. Helen remained behind
for various reasons, chiefly connected with the financial future of the
Browne family, and the small part of Calcutta interested in young Browne
found occupation for a few days in wondering what Miss Pellington would
have said if he had proposed to her. There was no doubt as to the point
that he did not. Calcutta is always accurately informed upon such
matters.

[Illustration: YOUNG BROWNE’S TENNIS FLUCTUATED FROM INDIFFERENT BAD TO
INDIFFERENT WORSE.]

The dreary waste of a year and four thousand miles that lay between Miss
Peachey and the state of memsahibship was relieved and made interesting
in the usual way by the whole Peachey family. You know what I mean,
perhaps, without details. Miss Kitty Peachey “etched” Kate Greenway
figures on the corners of table napkins, Miss Julia Peachey wrought the
monogram P. M. in the centre of pillow-shams with many frills, their
Aunt Plovtree, widow of a prominent physician of Canbury, at once “gave
up her time” to the adornment of Helen’s future drawing-room in
Kensington stitch, and Mrs. Peachey spent many hours of hers in the
composition of letters to people like John Noble, holding general
councils over the packets of patterns that came by return of post. Mrs.
Peachey was much occupied also in receiving the condolences of friends
upon so complete a separation from her daughter, but I am bound to say
that she accepted them with a fair show of cheerfulness. Mrs. Peachey
declared that she would wait until the time came before she worried. As
to both the wild animals and the climate she understood that they were
very much exaggerated, and, indeed, on account of Helen’s weak throat,
she was quite in hopes the heat might benefit her. And really nowadays,
India wasn’t so very far away after all, was it? It was difficult,
however, even with arguments like these, to reconcile the Canbury ladies
to the hardship of Helen’s fate, especially those with daughters of
their own who had escaped it. Helen listened to the condolences with
bright eyes and a spot of pink on each cheek. They brought her tender
pangs sometimes, but, speaking generally, I am afraid she liked them.

In six months it was positively time to begin to see about the
trousseau, because, as Mrs. Plovtree very justly remarked, it was not
like getting the child ready to be married in England, where one would
know from a pin or a button exactly what she wanted; in the case of
Indian trousseaux everything had to be thought out and considered and
time allowed to get proper advice in. For instance, there was that very
thing they were talking about yesterday—that idea of getting Jaeger all
through for Helen. It seemed advisable, but who knew _definitely_
whether it was! And if there _was_ an unsatisfactory thing in Mrs.
Plovtree’s opinion it was putting off anything whatever, not to speak of
an important matter like this, till the last moment.

The event redounded to the wisdom of Mrs. Plovtree, as events usually
did. It took the Peachey family quite six months to collect reliable
information and construct a trousseau for Helen out of it; six months
indeed, as Mrs. Peachey said, seemed too little to give to it. They
collected a great deal of information. Mrs. Peachey wrote to everybody
she knew who had ever been in India or had relations there, and so did
several friends of the Peacheys, and the results could not have been
more gratifying either in bulk or in variety. As their Aunt Plovtree
said, they really could not have asked for more, indeed they would have
had less difficulty in making up their minds without quite so much.
“_Do_ be advised,” one lady wrote, with impressive underlinings, “and
let her take as little as she can _possibly_ do with. It is impossible
to keep good dresses in India, the climate is simple _ruination_ to
them. I shall never forget the first year of my married life on that
account. It was a _heart-breaking_ experience, and I _do_ hope that
Helen may avoid it. Besides, the _durzies_, the native dressmakers, will
copy _anything_, and do it _wonderfully_ well, at about a fifth of the
price one pays at home.” Which read very convincingly. By the same post
a second cousin of Mrs. Plovtree’s wrote, “If you ask me, I should say
make a special point of having everything in reasonable abundance. The
European shops ask frightful prices, the natives are always
unsatisfactory, and your niece will find it very inconvenient to send to
England for things. My plan was to buy as little as possible in India,
and lay in supplies when we came home on leave!”

“In the face of that,” said Mrs. Plovtree, “what are we to do?”

Ladies wrote that Helen would require as warm a wardrobe as in England;
the cold might not be so great but she would “feel it more.” She must
take her furs, by all means. They wrote also that when they were in
India, they wore nothing more substantial than nun’s veiling, and a
light jacket the year round. They gave her intense directions about her
shoes and slippers—it was impossible to get nice ones in India—they were
made very well and cheaply in the “China bazar”—they lasted for ever if
one took care of them—they were instantly destroyed by mould and
cockroaches when “the rains” came on. She would require a size larger
than usual, on account of the heat; she must remember to take a size
smaller because she would use her feet so little that they would
decrease somewhat, everybody’s did. She must bear one thing in mind,
they were quite two years behind the fashion in India, so that it would
be advisable to date her garments back a little, not to be remarkable.
In another opinion there was this advantage, that in taking a
fashionable trousseau to India, one could rely upon its being the
correct thing for at least two years. The directions in flannel, and
cotton, and linen, were too complicated for precise detail, but they
left equal freedom of choice. And choice was difficult, because these
ladies were all ex-memsahibs, retired after fifteen, twenty, or
twenty-five years’ honourable service, all equally qualified to warn and
to instruct, and equally anxious to do it. They had lived in somewhat
different localities in India, ranging from seven to seven thousand feet
above the level of the sea, in the Northwest provinces, in the Punjab,
in Southern India, in Beluchistan, and none of them had spent more than
an occasional “cold weather” in Calcutta, but this triviality escaped
the attention of the Peachey family, in dealing with the matter. India,
to their imagination, was incapable of subdivision, a vast sandy area
filled with heathen and fringed with cocoanut trees, which drew a great
many young Englishmen away from their homes and their families for some
occult purpose connected with drawing pay in rupees. So the Peacheys put
these discrepancies down to the fact that people had such different
ideas, and proceeded to arrange Helen’s trousseau upon a modification of
all of them. When this was quite done Mrs. Plovtree remarked with some
surprise that with the addition of a few muslin frocks, the child had
been fitted out almost exactly as if she were going to live in England.
There was the wedding dress, which she might or might not wear upon the
occasion, it would be indispensable _after_wards; there was the
travelling dress chosen primarily not to “take the dust” and secondarily
not to show it; two or three gowns of incipient dignity for dinner
parties; two or three more of airier sorts for balls—but at this point I
must refer you to the ladies’ papers. Turn over a few of their pages and
you will see Helen’s trousseau illustrated with skill and imagination,
but with trains, I am bound to add, more prehensile than Helen ever
wore, the habit of the Peachey family being to follow the fashions at a
safe and unaggressive distance. Among the photographs of the brides
which accompany you may even find one fairly like Helen. These young
ladies have always struck me as bearing a charmingly subdued resemblance
to one another, probably induced by the similarly trying conditions
under which their portraits are published. And certainly in the lists of
presents appended you will find many, if not all of those that the Rev.
Peachey packed with his own clerical hands in large wooden boxes, for
consignment to the P. and O., indeed I fancy a discriminating inspection
of the advertisements would reveal most of them. As the Rev. Peachey
himself would say, I need not go into that.

Helen was the first bride that Canbury had contributed to India, in the
social memory. Two or three young men had gone forth to be brokers’
assistants or civil servants or bank clerks, and an odd red-coat turned
up periodically in the lower stratum of society on furlough, bringing
many-armed red and yellow idols to its female relatives; but Canbury had
no feminine connections with India, the only sort which are really
binding. Helen’s engagement had an extrinsic interest therefore, as well
as the usual kind, and Canbury made the most of it. There was the
deplorable fact, to begin with, that she could not be married at home.
Canbury gave a dubious assent to its necessity; everybody had a dim
understanding of the exigencies of “leave,” and knew the theory that
such departures from the orthodox and usual form of matrimonial
proceeding were common and unavoidable. Yet in its heart and out of the
Peachey and Plovtree earshot, Canbury firmly dissented, not without
criticism. Would anybody tell it why they had not gone out together last
year? On the face of it, there could be no question of saving. The young
man was not in debt, and received a salary of five hundred pounds a
year—had not Mr. Peachey’s curate married Jennie Plovtree a month after
they were engaged on two hundred, and no expectations whatever! Or why,
since they had made up their minds to wait, could they not have put it
off another year! Surely in two years Mr. Browne might scrape enough
together to come home again! Canbury thought it possessed a slight
opinion of a young man who could not come after his wife. Privately
Canbury upheld the extremest traditions of chivalry, and various among
Miss Peachey’s young lady friends, quite unconscious of fibbing,
confided to each other that “they wouldn’t be in Helen’s place for
anything.” In the rectory drawing-room, however, these stringencies took
a smiling face and a sympathetic form, sometimes disappearing altogether
in the exaltation of the subject’s general aspects. Helen was told it
was very “brave” of her, and Mrs. Peachey was admired for her courage in
letting her daughter go. At which she and Helen smiled into each other’s
eyes understandingly. Then Canbury began to search the aforesaid
advertisements in the ladies’ papers for mementoes suitable in character
and price, and to send them to the rectory with as hearty wishes for the
happiness of the future Brownes as if they had behaved properly in every
respect.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER II.


TO Mrs. Peachey, one very consoling circumstance connected with Helen’s
going to India was the good she would probably be able to do to “those
surrounding her.” Helen had always been “active” at home; she had been
the inspiration of work-parties, the life and soul of penny-readings.
She often took the entire superintendence of the night school. The
Canbury branch of the Y. W. C. T. U. did not know how it should get on
without her. Besides playing the organ of St. Stephen’s, in which,
however, another Miss Peachey was by this time ready to succeed her.
Much as Mrs. Peachey and the parish would miss Helen, it was a
sustaining thought that she was going amongst those whose need of her
was so much greater than Canbury’s. Mrs. Peachey had private chastened
visions, chiefly on Sunday afternoons, of Helen in her new field of
labor. Mrs. Peachey was not destitute of imagination, and she usually
pictured Helen seated under a bread-fruit tree in her Indian garden,
dressed in white muslin, teaching a circle of little “blacks” to read
the Scriptures. Helen was so successful with children; and so far as
being tempted to its ultimate salvation with goodies was concerned, a
black child was probably just like a white one. Of course, Helen would
have to adapt her inducements to circumstances—it was not likely that a
little Bengali could be baited with a Bath bun. Doubtless she would have
to offer them rice or—what else was it they liked so much?—oh yes!
sugar-cane. Over the form of these delicacies Mrs. Peachey usually went
to sleep, to dream of larger schemes of heathen emancipation which Helen
should inaugurate. Mr. Peachey, who knew how hard the human heart could
be, even in Canbury, among an enlightened people enjoying all the
blessings of the nineteenth century, was not so sanguine. He said he
believed these Hindus were very subtle-minded, and Helen was not much at
an argument. He understood they gave able theologians very hard nuts to
crack. Their ideas were entirely different from ours, and Helen would be
obliged to master their ideas before effecting any very radical change
in them. He was afraid there would be difficulties.

Mrs. Plovtree settled the whole question. Helen was not going out as a
missionary, except in so far as that every woman who married undertook
the charge of _one_ heathen, and she could not expect to jump into work
of that sort all at once. Besides, the people were so difficult to get
at, all shut up in zenanas and places. And she did not know the
language; first of all, she would have to conquer the language; not that
it would take Helen long, for see what she did in French and German at
school in less than a year! For her part, she would advise Helen to try
to do very little at first—to begin, say, with her own servants; she
would have a number of them, and they would be greatly under her
personal influence and control. Mrs. Plovtree imparted an obscure idea
of Helen’s responsibility for the higher welfare of her domestics, and a
more evident one that it would be rather a good thing to practice on
them, that they would afford convenient and valuable material for
experiments. In all of which Mrs. Peachey thoughtfully acquiesced,
though in fancy she still allowed herself to picture Helen leading in
gentle triumph a train of Rajahs to the bosom of the Church—a train of
nice Rajahs, clean and savoury. That, as I have said, was always on
Sunday afternoons. On the secular days of the week they discussed other
matters, non-spiritual, and personal, to which they were able to bring
more definiteness of perspective, and they found a great deal to say.

[Illustration: MRS. PEACHEY HAD PRIVATE CHASTENED VISIONS, CHIEFLY ON
SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, OF HELEN IN HER NEW FIELD OF LABOUR.]

A friend of young Browne’s had gone home opportunely on six months’
leave, and his recently acquired little wife would be “delighted,” she
said, to wreak her new-found dignity upon Helen in the capacity of
chaperone for the voyage out. But for this happy circumstance, Helen’s
transportation would have presented a serious difficulty, for the
Peacheys were out of the way of knowing the ever-flowing and returning
tide of Anglo-Indians that find old friends at Cheltenham and take
lodgings in Kensington, and fill their brief holiday with London
theatres and shopping. As it was, there was great congratulation among
the Peacheys, and they hastened to invite Mr. and Mrs. Macdonald to
spend a short time at the rectory before the day on which the ship
sailed. Mrs. Macdonald was extremely sorry that they couldn’t come;
nothing would have given them more pleasure, but they had so many
engagements with old friends of her husband’s, and the time was getting
so short and they had such a quantity of things to do in London before
they sailed, that—the Peacheys must resign themselves to disappointment.
Mrs. Macdonald hoped that they would all meet on board the _Khedive_,
but held out very faint hopes of making acquaintance sooner than that.
It was a bright agreeable letter as the one or two that came before had
been, but it left them all in a difficulty to conjure up Mrs. Macdonald,
and unitedly they lamented the necessity. What Mr. Macdonald was like,
as Mrs. Plovtree observed, being of no consequence whatever. But it was
absolute, and not until the _Khedive_ was within an hour of weighing
anchor at the Royal Albert Docks, did the assembled Peacheys, forlorn on
the main deck in the midst of Helen’s boxes, get a glimpse of Mrs.
Macdonald. Then it was brief. One of the stewards pointed out the
Peachey group to a very young lady in a very tight-fitting tailor-made
dress, swinging an ulster over her arm, who approached them briskly with
an outstretched hand and a business-like little smile. “I think you must
be Mr. and Mrs. Peachey,” she said; “I am Mrs. Macdonald. And where is
the young lady?” Mr. Peachey unbent the back of his neck in the clerical
manner, and Mrs. Peachey indicated Helen as well as she could in the
suffusion of the moment, taking farewell counsels of her sisters with
pink eyelids. “But you mustn’t _mind_ her going, Mrs. Peachey!” Mrs.
Macdonald went on vivaciously, shaking hands with the group, “she will
be sure to like it. Everybody likes it. _I_ am devoted to India! She’ll
soon get accustomed to everything, and then she won’t want to come
home—that’s the way it was with me. I dare say you won’t believe it, but
I’m dying to get back! You’ve seen your cabin?” she demanded of Helen,
“is it forward or aft? Are you port or starboard?”

The Peacheys opened their eyes respectfully at this nautical
proficiency, and Helen said she was afraid she didn’t know, it was down
some stairs and one turned to the left, toward the end of a long
passage, and then to the right into a little corner.

“Oh, then you’re starboard and a little forward of the engines!” Mrs.
Macdonald declared. “Very lucky you are! You’ll have your port open far
oftener than we will—we’re weather-side and almost directly over the
screw. So much for not taking one’s passage till three weeks before
sailing—and very fortunate we were to get one at all, the agent said. We
have the place to ourselves though, one can generally manage that by
paying for it you know—one comfort! How many in your cabin?”

“Three of us!” Helen responded apprehensively, “and it _is_ such a
little one! And the one whose name is Stitch has piled all her rugs and
portmanteaux on my bed, and there’s nowhere to put mine!”

“Oh, the cabins in this ship are not small,” returned Mrs. Macdonald
with seriousness. “She’s got a heavy cargo and they’re pretty low in the
water, if you like, but they’re not small. Wait till you get used to it
a little. As to Madam Stitch, just pop her bags and things on the
floor—don’t hesitate a moment. One _must_ assert one’s rights on
shipboard—it’s positively the only way! But there are some people to see
me off—I must fly!” She gave them a brisk nod and was on the wing to her
friends when Mrs. Peachey put a hand on her arm. “You spoke of the
ship’s being low in the water, Mrs. Macdonald. You don’t think—you don’t
think there is any danger on that account?”

Little Mrs. Macdonald stopped to enjoy her laugh. “Oh dear, no!” she
said with vast amusement, “rather the other way I should think—and we’ll
be a great deal steadier for it!” Then she went, and the Peacheys saw
her in the confused distance babbling as gaily in the midst of her
new-comers as if a thought of the responsibilities of chaperonage had
never entered her head.

“Helen, I believe you are older than she is!” exclaimed the youngest
Miss Peachey.

“I don’t like her,” remarked the second succinctly. “She giggles and she
gabbles. Helen, I wish some of _us_ were going with you.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind travelling,” said the Miss Peachey with the
prospective claim to the title.

“Dear _me_, Helen!” began Mrs. Peachey almost dolorously, “she—she seems
very bright,” changing her comment. After all they must make the best of
it. The Rev. Peachey clasped his stick behind his back, and tapped the
deck with it, saying nothing, with rather a pursing of his wide shaven
lips, Helen looked after Mrs. Macdonald helplessly, and her family
exchanged glances in which that lady might have read depreciation.

“Your roll-up, Helen?” exclaimed Mrs. Peachey.

“Here, mamma.”

“You have seven small pieces, remember! _Have_ you got your keys? Are
you sure you are dressed warmly enough? It will be some time before you
get to India, you know!” Mrs. Peachey had suffered an accession of
anxiety in the last ten minutes.

They stood looking at each other in the common misery of coming
separation, casting about for last words and finding none of any
significance, for people do not anticipate an event for a whole year
without exhausting themselves on the topic of it. Helen would keep a
little diary; she would post it at Gibraltar, Naples, Port Said, and
Colombo; and they were to write overland to Naples, and by the next mail
to Calcutta, which would reach before she did. These time-worn
arrangements were made over again. Helen thought of a last affectionate
message to her Aunt Plovtree and was in the act of wording it, when a
steward with a yellow envelope inquired of them for “any lady by the
name of Peachey.” The contents of the yellow envelope had telegraphic
brevity. “Good-bye and God bless you! J. Plovtree.” Helen read, and
immediately took out her handkerchief again. “Just like Jane!” said Mrs.
Peachey, sadly, with her eyes full, and Mr. Peachey, to cover his
emotion read aloud the hours at which the message had been received and
delivered. “Forty-two minutes” he announced “fairly quick!” Helen
proposed a walk on the quarter-deck. “The luggage, my dear child!” Mrs.
Peachey cried. “We mustn’t leave the luggage, with all these people
about! James, dear, it would not be safe to leave the luggage, would it!
You and the girls may go, Helen. Your father and I will stay here.”

[Illustration: AUNT PLOVTREE.]

“Oh, no!” Helen returned reproachfully, and clung to them all.

The crowd on the deck increased and grew noisier, people streamed up and
down the wide gangway. Cabin luggage came rattling down in cabs,
perilously late, the arm of the great steam-crane swung load after load
high in air and lowered it into the hold, asserting its own right of
way. “That’s one of your tin-lined boxes, Helen,” exclaimed Mrs.
Peachey, intent on the lightening of the last load, “and oh, I’m _sure_
it is not safe, dear! James won’t you _call_ to them that it is not
safe!” But the long deal case with “MISS PEACHEY, CALCUTTA,” in big
black letters on it was already describing an arc over the heads of the
unwary, and as it found its haven Mrs. Peachey made a statement of
excited relief, “I never saw such carelessness!” said she.

A number of ladies, dressed a good deal alike, arrived upon the deck in
company and took up a position near the forward part of the ship, where
the second class passengers were gathered together, producing little
black books. From these they began to sing with smiling faces and great
vigour, various hymns, with sentiments appropriate to long voyages,
danger, and exile from home. It was a parting attention from their
friends to a number of young missionaries for Burmah, probably designed
to keep up their spirits. The hymns were not exclusively of any church
or creed—Moody and Sankey contributed as many of them as the _Ancient
and Modern_, but they were all lustily emotional and befitting the
occasion to the most unfortunate degree. The departing missionaries
stood about in subdued groups and tried to wave their handkerchiefs. One
or two young lady missionaries found refuge in their cabins where they
might sob comfortably. The notes rang high and bathed the whole ship in
elegy, plaintively fell and reveled in the general wreck of spirits and
affectation of hilarity. It began to rain a little, but the ladies were
all provided with umbrellas, and under them sang on.

                   “While the nearer waters roll,
                    While the tempest still is high.”

“What idiots they are!” remarked the youngest plain-spoken Miss Peachey
when it became impossible to ignore the effect upon Helen’s feelings any
longer. “As if they couldn’t find anything else to sing than _that_!”

“Oh, my _dear_,” rebuked Mrs. Peachey, drying her eyes, “we may be sure
that their motive is everything that is good.” Whereat the youngest Miss
Peachey, unsubdued, muttered “_Motive!_”

“H’all this for the cabin, miss?” asked a steward, grasping a hat-box
and a portmanteau. “I don’t _quite_ know ‘ow that there _long_ box is
a-going in, miss. Is it accordin’ to the Company’s regillations, miss?”
Mr. Peachey interposed, with dignity, and said that it was—the precise
measurements. It came from the Army and Navy Stores, he was quite sure
the size was correct. The man still looked dubious, but when Helen said,
regardless of measurements, that she must have it, that it contained
nearly everything she wanted for the voyage, he shouldered it without
further dissent. He was accustomed to this ultimatum of seafaring
ladies, and bowed to it.

Mrs. Peachey began to think that they ought to go down to the cabin and
stay beside the luggage, there were so many odd-looking people about;
but she succumbed to the suggestion of being carried off; and they all
went up on the quarter-deck. Mrs. Macdonald was there—they might see
something more of Mrs. Macdonald. They clung to the hope.

They did see something more of Mrs. Macdonald—a little. She interrupted
herself and her friends long enough to approach the Peacheys and ask if
all Helen’s luggage was on board, “wedding presents and all?” jocularly.
Mrs. Peachey replied fervently that she hoped so, and Mrs. Macdonald
said, Oh, that was all right then, and Was she a good sailor? Oh, well,
she would soon get over it. And oh, by the by—departing to her beckoning
friends again—it was all right about their seats at table—Miss Peachey
was to sit by them—she had seen the head steward and he said there would
be no difficulty. Having thus reassured them, “I’ll see you again,” said
Mrs. Macdonald, and noddingly departed.

The first whistle shrilled and bellowed, and a parting stir responded to
it all over the ship. Mrs. Peachey looked agitated, and laid a hand on
Helen’s arm. “There is no cause for haste, mamma,” said the Rev.
Peachey, looking at his watch. “We have still twenty minutes, and there
is a quantity of freight yet to be got on board.” The missionary ladies
began a new hymn,

                 “Oh, think of the friends over there!”

“Only twenty minutes, my love! Then I think we ought really to be
getting off! My darling child——”

The whistle blew again stertorously, and the gangway began to throng
with friends of the outward-bound. The dear, tender, human-hearted
Peacheys clustered about the girl they were giving up—the girl who was
going from their arms and their fireside an infinite distance, to a land
of palm-trees and yams, to marry—and what a lottery marriage was!—a
young Browne. They held her fast, each in turn. “I almost w-wish I
w-weren’t go—” sobbed Helen in her mother’s embraces. “Helen!” said the
youngest Miss Peachey sternly, with a very red nose, “you do _nothing of
the sort_! You’re only too pleased and proud to go, and so should I be
in your place!” Which rebuke revived Helen’s loyalty to her Browne if it
did not subdue the pangs with which she hugged her sister.

At last the gangway was withdrawn and all the Peacheys were on the other
side of it. It rained faster, the missionary ladies still sang on,
people called last words to their friends in the damp crowd below. A box
of sweets was thrown to a young lady on the main deck—it dropped into
the black water between the ship and the wharf and was fished out with
great excitement. The Peacheys gathered in a knot under their several
umbrellas, and Helen stood desolately by herself watching them, now and
then exchanging a watery smile. They cast off the ropes, the Lascars
skipped about like monkeys, the crowd stood back, slowly the great ship
slipped away from the wharf into the river, and as she moved down stream
the crowd ran with her a little way, drowning the missionary ladies with
hurrahs. In the Peacheys’ last glimpse of their Helen she was standing
beside little Mrs. Macdonald and a stout gentleman with a pale face,
rather flabby and deeply marked about the mouth and under the eyes—a
gentleman whom nature had intended to be fair but whom climatic
conditions had darkened in defiance of the intention. Mrs. Macdonald
tapped the gentleman in a sprightly way with her parasol, for the
Peacheys’ benefit, and he took off his hat. The Peachey family supposed,
quite correctly, that that must be Mr. Macdonald.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER III.


HELEN thought the prospect of England slipping away from her in the rain
as the ship throbbed down the river, too desolate for endurance, so she
descended to her cabin with the unavowed intention of casting herself
upon her berth to weep. Miss Stitch was there, however, and Mrs.
Forsyth-Jones, who occupied the berth above Miss Stitch’s, and the
steward, which seemed to Helen a good many, and she retreated.

“Oh, come in!” both the ladies cried; but Helen thought it was obviously
impossible. She wandered into the long dining-saloon and sat down in one
of the revolving chairs; she watched a fat ayah patting a baby to sleep
on the floor, looked into the ladies’ cabin and went hastily out again,
for already the dejected had begun to gather there, prone on the sofas
and commiserated by the stewardesses. Finally she made her way upon deck
again, meeting Mrs. Macdonald in the companion-way. “Are you all right?”
asked Mrs. Macdonald cheerfully; but, before Helen had time to say that
she was or was not, the lady had disappeared.

The deck was full of irresolute people like herself, who sat about on
the damp benches or walked up and down under the awning, still with the
look of being fresh from town, still in gloves and stiff hats, and
land-faring garments. They put their hands in their pockets and
shivered, and looked askance at each other, or made vain attempts to
extract their own from the steamer chairs that were heaped up astern,
waiting the offices of a quartermaster. An occasional hurrying steward
was stopped a dozen times by passengers thirsting for information.
Barefooted Lascars climbed about their monkey-like business among the
ropes, or polished the brasses on the smoking-cabin, or holystoned a
deck which seemed to Helen immaculately clean before. She found a dry
corner and sat down in it to consider how much more familiar with the
ship many of the people seemed to be than she was, and to envy all the
accustomed ones. It seemed to Helen that she had better not analyse her
other emotions. She wasn’t comfortable, but no doubt she soon would be;
she wasn’t cheerful; but how could anybody expect that? She was restless
and damp and unhappy, and it finally became necessary for her to draw
young Browne’s photograph out of her hand-bag and peruse it in shelter
of the _Daily Graphic_ for a very long time. After which her spirits
rose appreciably. “He _is_ a dear!” she smiled to herself, “and he’s got
a lovely forehead—and in just five weeks I shall see him again—just five
weeks!”

Quite an ordinary reflection you see, without a shade of subtlety, a
reflection probably common to engaged young ladies the world over; but I
have already warned you under no circumstances to expect anything
extraordinary from Helen. It will be my fault if you find her dull, I
shall be in that case no faithful historian, but a traducer. I have not
known the present Mrs. Browne to be dull, even at the close of a
protracted round of Indian social gaieties; but you must not expect her
to be original.

The voyage to Calcutta began in this way, and I happen to know that its
chief feature of consolation—young Browne’s forehead—remained in Helen’s
pocket, and was constantly bespoken. Especially perhaps in the Bay of
Biscay, which fulfilled all its traditions for her benefit. I fear that
there were moments, tempestuous moments, in the Bay of Biscay,
heightened by the impassioned comments of Miss Stitch and Mrs.
Forsyth-Jones, when Helen did not dare to dwell upon the comparative
advantages of desiccated spinsterhood in Canbury, and matrimony in
foreign parts attainable only by sea. She felt that it would be
indiscreet, that she could not trust her conclusions to do credit to her
fealty. If it were not for Miss Stitch and Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, Helen
reflected, the horrors of the situation would have been less keen; but I
have no doubt that each of these ladies entertained the same sentiments
towards her two fellow-voyagers. They united, however, in extolling the
steward. The stewardess was a necessarily perfunctory person, with the
quaverings of forty ladies in her ears at once. The stewardess was
always sure she “didn’t know, ma’am,” and seemed to think it was a duty
one owed the ship to go up on deck, no matter how one felt. She was also
occasionally guilty of bringing one cold vegetables, if one occurred
about thirty-ninth upon her list of non-diners in public. But the
steward was a man, and always respectfully cheerful. He could tell
exactly why it was the ship rolled in that peculiar manner—owing to the
disposition of iron in the hold. He knew just how long they would be in
“the Bay,” and what sort of weather “she” would be likely to experience
during the night; also could predict within a quarter of an hour, the
time at which they would land at Gibraltar. He was generally incorrect
in every particular, but that made no difference to the value of his
sanguine prophecies, while it mitigated the distressful effects of his
gloomy ones. And it was always he who brought the first advice that the
ports might be opened, who calmed all fear of a possible rat or
cockroach “coming up from the hold,” and who heralded the ladies’
appearance on deck with armfuls of rugs, in the days of early
convalescence. They chanted to one another continually how “nice” he
was, and how hard he was obliged to work, poor fellow, each mentally
determining a higher figure for her farewell tip than she had thought of
the day before. This is the custom of ladies the world over who sail
upon the seas.

It must be mentioned that Mrs. Macdonald visited Helen’s cabin several
times in the Bay of Biscay. For her part Mrs. Macdonald was never ill,
she simply made up her mind not to be, and in her opinion if Helen would
only commit herself to a similar effort she would be all right
immediately. The expression of this opinion rather lessened the value of
Mrs. Macdonald’s sympathy; and the announcement that there was really
lovely weather going on above and the ship was beginning to be so jolly,
failed to make Helen any more comfortable. “Well, you are funny!” Mrs.
Macdonald would say cheerfully in departing, and she said it every day.

Mr. Macdonald remarked that Gibraltar looked much as usual the morning
they steamed under its hostile shadow, and Mrs. Macdonald said that if
she wasn’t in absolute need of some darning cotton and letter-paper she
wouldn’t think of going ashore—the place was such an old story. The
consideration of darning cotton prevailed, however, and the Macdonalds
went ashore, Helen with them. Helen’s acquaintance with the Macdonalds
had progressed meanwhile. She had learned what not to expect of them,
which excluded all but the gayest and airiest and most indifferent
companionship, and this facilitated matters between them considerably.
It was a little difficult at first. It seemed to this young lady from
Wiltshire, brought up among serious traditions of matrimony, that her
case, if not herself, ought to be taken a little more importantly; that
some impression of the fateful crisis in her life, toward which they
were helping to hurry her, ought to be evident occasionally in the
Macdonald conduct or conversation. It was only gradually that she came
to see how lightly such projects as hers and young Browne’s were
regarded by these people who were still in the initial stages of their
own; how little space she or her affairs occupied in their good-natured
thoughts; how invariably she must expect any reference to it to be
jocular. During the process Helen had now and then a novel sense of
making one of the various parcels which Mrs. Macdonald had undertaken to
bring out to friends in Calcutta—a feeling, that she ought properly to
be in an air-tight box in the hold, corded and labelled and expected to
give no further trouble. She realized, at moments, that she was being
“shipped” to young Browne.

They did exactly what everybody does in Gibraltar. There was no time to
get permission from the authorities and go through the galleries, there
never is. Barring which, the people of the ships find themselves without
resource except to drive in the rattle-trap conveyances of the place
through its narrow twisting, high-walled over-topping white streets and
out past the Spanish market, where everybody buys figs and pomegranates
to throw overboard afterwards, and so emerging from the town trot
through the sand and the short grass round the mighty gray foot of the
Rock, to look up and marvel at the terror of those irregular holes upon
its face, and the majesty that it had long before it became conscious
with cannon. Helen and the Macdonalds did all this and said just what P.
and O. voyagers have said for the last quarter of a century about it.
Coming back Mrs. Macdonald bought her darning cotton and her
letter-paper at a little shop, whose black-browed proprietor sold
photographs and wicked knives, and long pipes as well. Afterwards they
all strolled through the Alameda gardens, that cling for life among
their verbenas and rose bushes to the sides of the Rock, and finally
fell into that fatal corner shop which entraps the unwary with curios.
All roads seem to lead to it in Gibraltar, and one knows it by the crowd
of speculative passengers that encumber the doorway considering and
contrasting desirable purchases. The Spaniards inside are haughty and
indifferent, they will abate a shilling or two of their exorbitance
perhaps, not more. That is what the Macdonalds said to everybody in an
undertone—“You needn’t try, they won’t come down—it doesn’t seem to be
worth their while. We used to think they would, but now we don’t ask
them!” and in the face of this advice of experience the passengers
hesitated still more over their ill-shaped Moorish vases, black and red
and blue and gilt, their brass and coloured glass hanging lamps from
Cairo, their Persian china superficially gilt but beautifully blue. The
things that fascinated Helen were curious plaques in relief, all marshy
greens, in which the most realistic lizards and toads were creeping
about in imitated moss. Miss Peachey would have liked at least four of
these, they struck her as so original and clever, until Mrs. Macdonald
at her elbow said, in an impressive whisper “_Don’t!_ You see them in
_boarding_-houses in Calcutta!” when she put them reluctantly down, and
bought a big bedecked Spanish hat to make a work-basket of, and a large
fan, upon which sundry ladies of depraved appearance and very Irish
features were dancing a _fandango_ instead. I have seen that fan in the
present Mrs. Browne’s Calcutta drawing-room frequently since. She has it
fastened on the wall immediately under a photogravure of _The Angelus_,
and she will not take it down.

Between Gibraltar and Naples, Helen observed the peculiarities of the
species P. and O. passenger, the person who spends so large a portion of
a lifetime shorter than the average, in wondering how much more of this
delightful or this abominable weather “we’ll have,” in the Indian Ocean
or the Red Sea. She observed that Miss Stitch arose betimes every
morning, and attended the service held by the little pale ritualistic
clergyman in the saloon before the tables were laid for breakfast, which
struck her as eminently proper, Miss Stitch being a missionary. She also
noticed that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, returning to her husband in Burmah,
with three photographs of him in uniform variously arranged in the
cabin, had as many small flirtations well in hand, one in the morning,
of the promenade sort, with a middle-aged Under-Secretary, one in the
afternoon, conducted in long chairs, enhanced by sunset, with a Royal
Engineer, whose wife was similarly occupied at the other end of the
ship, and one in the evening in a secluded corner of the hurricane deck,
charitably witnessed by the moon and stars, with a callow indigo planter
about the age of her eldest son. Helen thought that the missionary or
somebody, some older person, ought to speak to this lady in terms of
guarded reproof, and tell her that her conduct was more conspicuous than
perhaps she knew; and our young lady from Wiltshire was surprised to
observe not only that nobody did, but that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones seemed to
be a person of some popularity on board. The Macdonalds, for instance,
hung about her chair with solicitude, in the temporary absence of any of
the _attachés_. Mrs. Macdonald herself had plenty of “men-friends” as
she called them. They buzzed about her, whenever she sat or stood long
enough to permit their approach, all day—they were always bringing her
rugs, or old numbers of _Punch_, or an orange. But Mrs. Macdonald did
not particularize, she was content with a general empire, though she
prized that, as anybody could see. Among the throng Mr. Macdonald
remained supreme; she expected most attention from him too, and she
called him “Mac.”

Miss Stitch confided to Miss Peachey her opinion that “the people on
board this ship” were more than usually cliquey; but this was not a
conclusion that Helen would have arrived at unassisted. She saw about
her day after day, lining the long tables and afterwards scattered about
easefully on deck, a great many people, some of whom she thought
agreeable-looking, and others distinctly the reverse. Miss Stitch seemed
to think one ought to know everybody. Helen was sure that a few—a very
few—of the agreeable-looking people would do quite well. She did not see
at all how Miss Stitch could bring herself to talk to the person who sat
next her at table, and wore a large diamond ring on his third finger,
and drank champagne every day at tiffin, and said he was travelling for
his “’ealth,” and pointed most of his remarks with a tooth-pick. Helen
thought that even missionary zeal would not carry her so far as that. On
the other hand, she found it difficult to understand why everybody,
including Miss Stitch, seemed agreed not to make acquaintance with a
soft-eyed, sad-faced lady of rather dark complexion, who talked in a
gentle voice with a slightly foreign accent, Helen thought, and was
accompanied by three daughters, who much resembled her. They looked very
quiet and lady-like to Helen, and she thought the manners of certain
boisterous young ladies who polkaed with the ship’s officers on a
heaving deck after dinner, and whom everybody accepted, suffered by
comparison with them. When she was told that their name was De Cruz,
Helen privately criticised her fellow countrywomen’s attitude. “It must
be,” she said to herself, “because they are foreign.” And so it
was—because they were foreign. “About four annas in the rupee,” said
Miss Stitch about them one day, and told Helen that she would find out
what that meant before she had been long in India. But Miss Stitch, M.
D., was interested in the welfare, temporal and eternal, only of ladies
who were “pure native.”

Then one peaceful rainy morning, after a rolling night, Naples lay
before them, gathered all about her harbour with Vesuvius gently
smoking in the distance. The slippery hurricane deck was full of
people looking for Vesuvius, grouped round the single male passenger,
who, awakened by the first officer at four in the morning, had seen it
spouting fire. Enviable male passenger! Invidious first officer! Out
from shore came disreputable Neapolitan companies in small boats, with
stringed instruments, who lay under the ship’s sides and sang,
“Finiculi—Finicula!” in a lavish and abandoned manner, turning up
their impudent faces for contributions from the truly musical souls on
board. Helen listened, enraptured, to a number of these renditions,
after which she concluded that she preferred “Finiculi—Finicula” as
she had heard it sung by Mr. Browne, in Canbury, Wilts. After
breakfast, the Macdonalds attached themselves to an exploring party
for Pompeii, under the guidance of a black-browed Neapolitan,
representing Messrs. Cook. Mrs. Macdonald went about in a pretty, new
waterproof, with Bulwer’s _Last Days_ in her hand, telling people she
really must go this time, she had been lazy so often before, and it
was so awfully cheap with these people—carriages, rail, tiffin and see
everything for only thirty francs each! Helen and Miss Stitch stayed
behind, the night had been too rough to let them venture on the
absorption of so much ancient history, even at this advantageous rate.
But later, when the sun came out, the young ladies recovered their
spirits sufficiently to cruise adventurously to shore by themselves,
to engage a ragged-pocketed “guide” of perhaps thirteen, and a
rattling little victoria, pulled by a clinking little pony, with bells
upon his collar, and drive about Naples for three delicious hours. I
can’t say they added much to their stock of information. They had no
idea where to go and what to see; but one can always absorb colour and
life without a guide-book, happily; and I know, from what she told me
afterward, that Helen Peachey did that. They found abundant happiness
in the curio shops and much unpalatable fruit in the open market; they
filled their rattle-trap of a carriage with great bunches of tiny pink
roses at a few coppers apiece, and buried their faces in them. They
were told, driving through a grand toppling main street, all draped
and garlanded with little glass bells for candles, red, green, and
blue, that the King was coming next day. The boy guide told them this.
He showed them also the Royal Palace, with all the statues of former
kings standing about outside, and the “Grand Café de l’Europe,” much
embellished by a painter whose art had evidently once found favour
with the municipality. In the opinion of the guide, the “Grand Café de
l’Europe” was what reasonable people came to Naples to see; he pointed
it out many times and with an increasing show of personal admiration.
He was a very useful, clever boy the young ladies thought, especially
when he took them to the post office and obtained for Miss Stitch a
receipt for the registered letter she wanted to send away, in as
business-like a manner as if he were in the habit of transmitting
large sums abroad daily. “Don’ you lossit, for _good_niz sake!” he
exclaimed, as he gave her the slip. But I doubt whether he was quite
worth the sum he claimed at the water’s edge when they departed—the
pay of a full-grown, well-fed guide for a whole day, plus a
_pourboire_, which they ungrudgingly gave between them.

But I cannot give any more of my valuable space to Mrs. Browne’s
reminiscences of that voyage, which must, according to the volumes of
them, have lasted a space of about seven months. I believe they were all
very gay at Port Said, walking through the single wide China bazar
street of the place, flaming with colour and resonant of musicians in
the gambling houses, drinking black coffee on the boulevard, and
realizing no whit of Port Said’s iniquity. The Suez Canal had no
incident but several loathly odors, and then came the long smooth voyage
to Colombo and a fantastic glimpse of first cocoanut trees fringing the
shores of Ceylon. A great deal here about sapphires and rubies and cat’s
eyes and little elephants made of ivory and small brown diving-boys, and
first tropical impressions, but I must not linger in the chronicling.
Then the sail up to Madras, and the brief tarrying there, and the days
that came after, short days when everybody packed and rejoiced. At last,
one night at ten o’clock, a light that was not a star, shining far
through the soft still darkness beyond the bow of the ship, the light at
the mouth of a wide brown river that slipped to the sea through the
India, Helen would see in the morning, and past the city whither her
simple heart had gone before her.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Macdonald kept out of the way. It was the one considerate thing she
did during the voyage. Young Browne, rather white and nervous-looking,
came upon Mr. Macdonald first in the turbulent shore-going crowd. Mr.
Macdonald was genial and reassuring. “You’ll find her over there, old
man,” said he without circumlocution, “rather back. Better bring her up
to Hungerford Street to breakfast yourself.” And Helen straightway was
found by young Browne in the precise direction Mr. Macdonald had
indicated, and “rather back.” She always remembers very distinctly that
on that occasion she wore a blue Chambray frock and a sailor hat with a
white ribbon round it. It is not a matter of consequence, still it might
as well be mentioned.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER IV.


I HAVE no doubt that the present Mrs. Browne would like me to linger
over her first impressions of Calcutta. She has a habit now of stating
that they were keen. That the pillared houses and the palm-shaded
gardens, and the multiplicity of turbaned domestics gave her special
raptures, which she has since outgrown, but still likes to claim. She
said nothing about it at the time, however, and I am disposed to believe
that the impressions came later, after young Browne had become a
familiar object, and all the boxes were unpacked. As they were not
married immediately, but a week after the _Khedive_ arrived, to give
Mrs. Macdonald time to unpack _her_ boxes, the former of these processes
was an agreeably gradual one occupying six morning and evening drives in
Mr. Browne’s dog-cart, and sundry half-hours between. Mrs. Macdonald
wanted to make the house pretty for the wedding. “Really, child,” said
she, “you can’t be married in a barn like this!” and to that end she
drew forth many Liberty muslins, much “art” needlework, and all the
decoration flotsam and jetsam of the season’s summer sales in Oxford
Street. I understand that both the Brownes protested against the plan to
have a wedding; they only wanted to be married, they said, of course in
the Church, regularly, but without unnecessary circumstance. “People can
see it next day in _The Englishman_,” suggested young Browne, urged
privately to this course by Helen. But it was a point upon which Mrs.
Macdonald was inflexible. “Certainly not a _big_ wedding,” said she,
“since you don’t want it, but a few people we must have just to see it
properly done. What would Calcutta think of you”—reproachfully, to young
Browne, “getting the knot tied that way, in a corner! Besides, it will
be a lovely way of letting everybody know we are back. _I’ll_ manage
it—I know exactly who you ought to have!”

Thereupon Helen brought out from among her effects a certain square
wooden box, and besought that it might be opened. “It’s—it’s the cake,”
she explained with blushes; “mother thought I ought to bring it—”

“Oh, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Macdonald briskly; “everybody does.
There were five altogether on board the _Khedive_. Let us hope it has
carried well!”

They opened the box, and Helen took out layers of silver paper with
nervous fingers. “It seems a good deal crushed,” she said. Then she came
upon a beautiful white sugar bird of Paradise lacking his tail, and
other fragments dotted with little silver pellets, and the petals of a
whole flower-garden in pink icing. “It has _not_ carried well!” she
exclaimed grievously—and it hadn’t. It was the proudest erection of the
Canbury confectioner’s experience, a glory and a wonder when it arrived
at the Rectory, but it certainly had not carried well: it was a
travelled wreck.

“Looks very sorry for itself!” remarked young Browne, who happened to be
present.

“It must have happened in that hateful Bay of Biscay!” said Helen, with
an inclination to tears.

“Oh, never mind!” Mrs. Macdonald put in airily, as if it were a trifle.
“It’s easy enough to get another. I’ll send a chit to Peliti’s this very
afternoon. You can use up this one for five o’clock tea afterwards.”

“But do you think it won’t do at all, Mrs. Macdonald?” Helen begged.
“You see the lower tier isn’t much damaged, and it came all the way from
home, you know.”

“I think it ought to do,” remarked young Browne.

“My _dear_!” cried her hostess, “think of how it would _look_! In the
midst of everything! It would quite spoil your wedding! Oh, no—we’ll
have another from Peliti’s.”

“What could one do?” confided Mrs. Browne to me afterwards. “It was
_her_ affair—not ours in the least. We were getting married, don’t you
see, for her amusement!” But that was in one of Mrs. Browne’s ungrateful
moments. And was private to me. Generally speaking, Mrs. Browne said she
thought the Macdonalds arranged everything charmingly. The Canbury cake
went, however, to the later suburban residence of the Brownes, and was
there consumed by them in the reckless moments of the next six months.

I was one of the people Mrs. Macdonald knew the Brownes ought to have,
and I went to the wedding, in a new heliotrope silk. I remember that
also came out by the _Khedive_. It was in the Cathedral, at four o’clock
in the afternoon, full choral service, quantities of flowers, and two
heads of departments in the company, one ex-Commissioner, and a Member
of Council. None of them were people the Brownes were likely to see much
of afterward, in my opinion, and I wondered at Mrs. Macdonald’s asking
them; but the gown she graced the occasion in would have justified an
invitation to the Viceroy—pale green poplin with silver embroidery.

The bride came very bravely up the aisle upon the arm of her host, all
in the white China silk, a little crushed in places, which the Canbury
dressmaker had been reluctantly persuaded to make unostentatiously. The
bridegroom stood consciously ready with his supporter; we all listened
to the nervous vows, sympathetically thinking back; the little Eurasian
choir-boys sang lustily over the pair. Two inquisitive black crows
perched in the open window and surveyed the ceremony, flying off with
hoarse caws at the point of the blessing; from the world outside came
the hot bright glare of the afternoon sun upon the Maidan, and the
creaking of the ox-gharries,[1] and the chatting of the mynas in the
casuerina[2] trees, and the scent of some waxy heavy-smelling thing of
the country—how like it was to every other Indian wedding where a maid
comes trippingly from over seas to live in a long chair under a punkah,
and be a law unto kitmutgars!

Footnote 1:

  Native ox-carts.

Footnote 2:

  Australian fir.

The new Mrs. Browne received our congratulations with shy distance after
it was all over. She looked round at the big stucco church with its
white pillars and cane chairs, and at our unfamiliar faces, with a
little pitiful smile. I had, at the moment, a feminine desire to slap
Mrs. Macdonald for having asked us. And all the people of the Rectory,
who ought to have been at the wedding, were going about their ordinary
business, with only now and then a speculative thought of this.
Everybody who really cared was four thousand miles away, and unaware. We
could not expect either of them to think much of our perfunctory
congratulations, although Mr. Browne expressed himself very politely to
the contrary in the valuable sentiments he uttered afterwards in
connection with champagne cup and the Peliti wedding cake, on Mrs.
Macdonald’s veranda.

They had a five days’ honeymoon, so far as the outer world was
concerned, and they spent it at Patapore. Darjiling, as young Browne was
careful to explain to Helen, was the proper place, really the thing to
do, but it took twenty-six hours to get to Darjiling, and twenty-six
hours to get back, and nobody wanted to plan off a five days’ honeymoon
like that. Patapore, on the contrary, was quite accessible, only six
hours by mail.

“Is it a hill-station?” asked Helen, when they discussed it.

“Not precisely a hill-station, darling, but it’s on rising ground—a
thousand feet higher than this.”

“Is it an interesting place?” she inquired.

“I think it ought to be, under the circumstances.”

“_George!_ I mean are there any temples there, or anything?”

“I don’t remember any temples. There is a capital dâk-bungalow.”

“And what is a dâk-bungalow, dear? How short you cut your hair, you dear
old thing!”

“That was provisional against your arrival, darling—so you couldn’t pull
it. A dâk-bungalow is a sort of government hotel, put up in unfrequented
places where there aren’t any others, for the accommodation of
travellers.”

“_Unfrequented_ places! O George! Any snakes or tigers?”

“Snakes—a few, I dare say. Tigers—let me see; you _might_ hear of one
about fifty miles from there.”

“Dreadful!” shuddered Helen, rubbing her cheek upon George’s convict
crop. “But what is the _attraction_, dear?”

“The air,” responded he, promptly substituting his moustache. “Wonderful
air! Think of it, Helen—a thousand feet up!”

But Helen had not been long enough in India to think of it. “Air is a
thing one can get anywhere,” she suggested; “isn’t there anything else?”

“Seclusion, darling—the most perfect seclusion! Lots to eat—there’s
always the railway restaurant if the dâk-bungalow gives out, capital
air, nice country to walk over, and not a soul to speak to but our two
selves!”

“Oh!” said Helen. “It _sounds_ very nice, dear——” And so they agreed.

It was an excellent dâk-bungalow without doubt, quite a wonder in
dâk-bungalows. It was new, for one thing—they are not generally new—and
clean, they are not generally clean. There had been no deserted palace
or disused tomb for the government to utilize at Patapore, so they had
been obliged to build this dâk-bungalow, and they built it very well. It
had a _pukka_[3] roof instead of a thatched one, which was less
comfortable for the karaits but pleasanter to sleep under; and its walls
were straight and high, well raised from the ground, and newly
white-washed. Inside it was divided into three pairs of rooms, one in
the middle and one at each end. You stepped into one of your rooms on
the north side of the house and out of the other on the south side, upon
your share of the south veranda. The arrangement was very simple, each
pair of rooms was separate and independent, and had nothing to say to
any other.

Footnote 3:

  Made of brick and mortar.

The furniture was simple too, its simplicity left nothing to be desired.
There were charpoys[4] to sleep on, travellers brought their own
bedding. In one room there were two chairs and a table, in the other a
table and two chairs. There was nothing on the floor and nothing on the
walls. There was ample accommodation for the air of Patapore, and no
other attraction to interfere with it. I don’t know whether we have any
right to accompany the Brownes to Patapore, and to stay with them there;
it is certain that we would not be welcome, if they knew it. It is
equally certain that nobody else did—they were, as young Browne had
predicted, supremely alone. At seven in the morning the old khansamah in
charge of the place gave them chota hazri[5] in the room with the table
in it, bringing tea in a chipped brown teapot, and big thick cups to
drink it out of, one edged with blue and the other with green, and
buttered toast upon a plate which did not match anything. He was a
little brown khansamah, with very bright eyes and a thin white beard and
a trot—he reminded one curiously of a goat. His lips were thin and much
compressed; he took the Brownes solemnly, and charged them only three
rupees a day each for their food, which young Browne found astonishingly
moderate, though Helen, when she worked it out in shillings and pence,
and considered the value received, could not bring herself to agree with
this.

Footnote 4:

  Native beds.

Footnote 5:

  Little breakfast.

After chota hazri they went for walks, long walks, stepping off the
dâk-bungalow veranda, as Helen said, into India as it was before ever
the Sahibs came to rule over it. For they could turn their backs upon
the long straight bank of the railway and wander for miles in any
direction over a country that seemed as empty as if it had just been
made. As far as they could see it rolled in irregular plains and low
broken ridges and round hillocks all covered with short, dry grass, to
the horizon, and there, very far away, the gray outlines of an odd
mountain or two stood against the sky. A few sarl trees were scattered
here and there in clumps, all their lower branches stolen for firewood,
and wherever a mud hut squatted behind a hillock there grew a tall
castor oil bean tree or two, and some plantains. There were tracks of
cattle, there was an occasional tank that had evidently been dug out by
men, and there were footpaths making up and over the hillocks and across
the stony beds of the empty _nullahs_;[6] but it was only in the morning
or in the evening that they met any of the brown people that lived
thereabouts. Then they came in little straggling strings and bands,
looking at these strangers from under inverted baskets, appearing from
nowhere and disappearing in vague and crooked directions. Helen’s
husband told her that they were coolies working in coal mines on the
side of the railway. There were crows, too, and vultures—the crows were
familiar and impertinent, the vultures sailed high and took no notice of
them—and that was all. They went forth and they came back again. Helen
made a few primitive sketches in her husband’s note-book. I do not think
she did the country justice, but her sketches seemed to me to indicate
the character of her impressions of it. They went forth and they came
back again, always to a meal—breakfast, or tiffin, or dinner, as the
case might be. Helen liked dinner best, because then the lamps were
lighted, and she had an excuse for changing her dress. They partook of
these meals with three-tined steel forks, and knives worn down to dagger
points, according to the unfathomable custom of the _mussalchi_.[7] The
courses consisted of variations upon an original leg of mutton which
occurred at one of their earlier repasts, served upon large cracked
plates with metal reservoirs of hot water under them, and embellished by
tinned peas of a suspicious pallor. And always there was
_moorghy_[8]—moorghy boiled and fried and roasted, moorghy cutlets,
moorghy curry, moorghy stew. “Nice old person,” said Helen, the first
time it appeared, “he has given us fowl! Dear old patriarch.” “He may or
may not be a dear old patriarch,” George responded, fixing grim eyes
upon the bird, “but he is tolerably sure to have the characteristics of
one. You aren’t acquainted with the indigenous moorghy yet, Helen. You
regard him in the light of a luxury, as if he were a Christian fowl. He
isn’t a luxury out here upon my word. He stalks up and down all over
India improving his muscular tissues, he doesn’t disdain to pick from a
drain, he costs threepence to buy. He is an inferior creature still. It
may be a prejudice of mine, but if there’s any other form of sustenance
to be had I don’t eat moorghy.”

Footnote 6:

  Stream beds.

Footnote 7:

  Dishwasher.

Footnote 8:

  Fowl.

“He tastes,” said Mrs. Browne after experiment, “like an
‘indestructible’ picture-book.” It was an unwarrantable simile upon Mrs.
Browne’s part, since she could not possibly remember the flavour of the
literature she used to suck as an infant; but her verdict was never
reversed, and so one Indian staple passed out of the domestic
experiences of the Brownes.

These two young people had unlimited conversation, and one of them a
great many more cigars than were good for him. So far as I have been
able to discover, by way of diversion they had nothing else. It had not
occurred to either of them that the equipment of a honeymoon required
any novels; and the dâk-bungalow was not provided with current fiction.
They covered an extensive range of subjects, therefore, as they thought,
exhaustively. As a matter of fact, their conversation was so superficial
in its nature, and led to such trivial conclusions, that I do not
propose to repeat it. They were very unanimous always. Young Browne
declared that if his views had habitually received the unqualified
assent which Helen gave them he would have been a member of the
Viceroy’s Council years before. They could not say enough in praise of
the air of Patapore, and when the wind rose it blew them into an
ecstasy. Frequently they discussed the supreme advantages of a
dâk-bungalow for a honeymoon, and then it was something like this on the
afternoon of the third day.

“The perfect freedom of it, you know—the being able to smoke with one’s
legs on the table——”

“Yes, dear. I love to see you doing it. It’s so—it’s so home-like!” (I
think I see the Rev. Peachey with his legs upon the table!) Then, with
sudden animation, “Do you know, George, I think I heard boxes coming
into the next room!”

“Not at all, Helen. You didn’t, I’m sure you didn’t. And then the
absolute silence of this place——”

“Lovely, George! And that’s how I heard the boxes so distinctly.”
Getting up and going softly to the wall—“George, there are people in
there!”

“Blow the people! However, they haven’t got anything to do with us.”

“But perhaps—perhaps you know them, George!”

“Most piously I hope I don’t. But never mind, darling. We can easily
keep out of the way, in any case. We won’t let them spoil it for us.”

“N-no, dear, we won’t. Certainly not. But you’ll find out who they are,
won’t you, Georgie? Ask the khansamah, just for the sake of knowing!”

“Oh, we’ll find out who they are fast enough. But don’t be distressed,
darling. It will be the simplest thing in the world to avoid them.”

“Of course it will,” Mrs. Browne responded. “But I think, George dear, I
really must put on my tailor-made this afternoon in case we _should_
come in contact with them in any way.”

“We won’t,” replied George, cheerfully lighting another cigar.

To which Mrs. Browne replied without seeming relevance, “I consider it
perfectly SHAMEFUL for dâk-bungalows to have no looking-glasses.”

An hour later Helen flew in from the veranda. “Oh, George, I’ve seen
them: two men and a lady and a black and white dog—spotted! Quite nice,
respectable-looking people, all of them! They walked past our veranda.”

“Confound their impudence! Did they look in?”

“The dog did.”

“None of the rest? Well, dear, which way did they go?”

Helen indicated a south-easterly direction, and the Brownes that evening
walked almost directly north, with perhaps a point or two to the west,
and did not return until it was quite dark.

The fourth day after breakfast, a stranger entered the veranda without
invitation. He was clad chiefly in a turban and loin cloth, and on his
head he bore a large tin box. He had an attendant, much like him, but
wearing a dirtier loin-cloth, and bearing a bigger box.

“Oh! who is it?” Helen cried.

“It’s one of those wretched box-wallahs, dear—a kind of pedlar. I’ll
send him off. _Hujao_,[9] you!”

Footnote 9:

  Be off!

“Oh, _no_, George! Let us see what he has to sell,” Helen interposed
with interest; and immediately the man was on the floor untying his
cords.

“My darling, you can’t want anything from him!”

“_Heaps_ of things—I shall know as soon as I see what he’s got, dear!
To begin with, there’s a lead pencil! So far as I know I haven’t a
lead pencil in the world. I’ll take that lead pencil! Soap? No, I
think not, thank you. Do tell me what he says, George. Elastic—the
very thing I wanted. And tape? Please ask him if he’s got any tape.
Tooth-brushes—what do you think, George?”

“_Not_ tooth-brushes!” her lord protested, as one who endures. “They may
be second-hand, dear.”

“_Oh!_ No! Here, take them back, please! Ribbon—have you any narrow pale
blue? That’s _about_ right, if you’ve nothing better. Hooks and eyes are
always useful. So are mixed pins and sewing cotton. I can’t say I think
much of these towels, George, they’re very thin—still we shall _want_
towels.”

Mrs. Browne was quite pink with excitement, and her eyes glistened. She
became all at once animated and eager, a joy of her sex was upon her,
and unexpectedly. The box-wallah was an Event, and an Event is a thing
much to be desired, even in one’s honeymoon. This lady had previously
and has since made purchases much more interesting and considerably more
expensive than those that fell in her way at Patapore; but I doubt
whether any of them afforded her a tenth of the satisfaction. She turned
over every one of the box-wallah’s commonplaces, trusting to find a need
for it. She laid embroidered edging down unwillingly, and put aside
handkerchiefs and hosiery with a sigh, pangs of conscience arising from
a trousseau just unpacked. But it was astonishing how valuably
supplementary that box-wallah’s stores appeared to be. Helen declared,
for instance, that she never would have thought of Persian morning
slippers, which she has never yet been able to wear, if she had not seen
them there, and this I can believe.

The transaction occupied the best part of two hours, during which young
Browne behaved very well, smoking quietly, and only interfering once, on
the score of some neckties for himself. And when Helen remonstrated that
everything seemed to be for her, he begged her to believe that he really
didn’t mind—he didn’t feel acquisitive that morning; she mustn’t
consider him. To which Helen gave regretful compliance, for the
box-wallah had a large stock of gentlemen’s small wares. In the end Mr.
Browne paid the box-wallah, in a masterly manner, something over a third
of his total demand, which he accepted, to Helen’s astonishment, with
only a perfunctory demur, and straight away put his box on his head and
departed. About which time young Browne’s bearer came with respectful
inquiry as to which train he would pack their joint effects for on the
morrow. This is an invariable terminal point for honeymoons in India.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               CHAPTER V.


IT is time, perhaps, to state a few facts about Mr. George William
Browne in addition to those which are in the reader’s possession
already. I have mentioned, I think, that he played tennis badly and was
fond of privacy; it runs in my mind also that I have in some way
conveyed to you that he is a rather short and thickly built young
gentleman, with brown eyes and a dark moustache, and a sallow complexion
and a broad smile. Helen declares him handsome, and I never considered
him unpleasant-looking, but it is undoubtedly the case that he is very
like other young men in Calcutta, also clerks in tea and indigo houses
on five hundred rupees a month, with the expectation of partnership
whenever retirement or fever shall remove a head of the firm. His tastes
were common to Calcutta young men also. He liked golf and polo, and
regretted that his pony was not up to the paper-chases; in literature he
preferred Clark Russell and the _Pioneer_, with Lord Lytton for serious
moments. He complied with the customs of the Cathedral to the extent of
a silk hat and a pair of gloves in the cold weather, and usually
attended one service every Sunday, invariably contributing eight annas
to the offertory. His political creed was simple. He believed in India
for the Anglo-Indians, and despised the teaching and hated the
influence, with sturdy reasons, of Exeter Hall. Any views that he had of
real importance mainly concerned the propagation of tea in distant
markets; but his spare ideas had a crispness that gave them value in a
society inclined to be intellectually limp, and his nature was
sufficiently cheerful and sympathetic to make him popular, in connection
with the fact that he was undeniably a good fellow.

When all this has been said, I fear that Mr. Browne will not appear in
these pages with the equipment proper for a young man of whom anything
is expected in the nature of modern fiction. Perhaps this, however, is
not so important as it looks, which will be more evident when we reflect
that in marrying Miss Helen Frances Peachey Mr. Browne performed
considerably the greater part of what will be required of him in this
history.

That Young Browne’s _tulub_[10] was only five hundred rupees a month is,
however, a fact of serious importance both to the Brownes and to the
readers of these chapters. It must be borne in mind, even as the Brownes
bore it in mind, to the proper understanding of the unpretending matters
herein referred to. There are parts of the world in which this amount
translated into the local currency, would make a plutocrat of its
recipient. Even in Calcutta, in the olden golden time when the rupee was
worth two invariable shillings and the stockbroker waxed not so fat as
now, there was a sweet reasonableness about an income of five hundred
that does not exist to-day. There is no doubt, for one thing, that at
that time it did not cost so much to live in a house. At the present
time, and in view of the degeneracy of the coin, that luxury is not so
easy to compass as it used to be.

Footnote 10:

  Pay.

The Brownes would live in a house, however. Young Browne, when the
matter was up for discussion, stated with some vehemence his objection
to the Calcutta system of private hostelries. Helen said conclusively
that if they had no other reason for housekeeping, there were those
lovely dessert knives and forks from Aunt Plovtree, and all the other
silver things from people, to say nothing of the complete supply of
house and table linen, ready marked with an artistically intertwined
“HB.” In the face of this, to use other people’s cutlery and table
napkins would be foolish extravagance—didn’t George think so? George
thought so, very decidedly, that was quite a strong point. It must be a
whole house, too, and not a flat; there was no autonomy in a flat and no
proprietorship of the compound; moreover, you were always meeting the
other people on the stairs. By all means a house to themselves—“if
possible,” added young Browne.

“About what rent does one pay for a house?” Helen inquired.

“You get a fairly good one for three hundred a month, on lease. A
visiting Rajah down for the cold weather to try for a ‘C. I. E.’[11]
sometimes pays a thousand.”

Footnote 11:

  Companion of the Indian Empire.

“But we,” responded Mrs. Browne blankly, “are not Rajahs, dear!”

“No, thank the Lord,” said Mr. Browne, with what struck his wife as
unnecessary piety; “and we’ll make ourselves jolly comfortable
notwithstanding. Nellums—you’ll see!” George Browne was always
over-optimistic. If those two young people had come to me—but it goes
without saying that they went to nobody.

Helen desired a garden, a tennis-court, and, if possible, a cocoanut
palm-tree in the garden. She would prefer a yellow house to a pink one,
in view of the fact that the houses were all yellow or pink, and she
would like a few pillars in front of it—pillars seemed so common an
architectural incident in Calcutta that she thought they must be cheap.
Mr. Browne particularly wanted air in the house, “a good south veranda,”
and a domicile well raised above its native Bengal. Mr. Browne was
strong upon locality and drains, and the non-proximity of jungle and
bushes. Helen bowed to his superior knowledge, but secretly longed that
a garden with a cocoanut palm in it might be found in a neighbourhood
not insanitary. And so they fared forth daily in a ticca-gharry to
inspect desirable addresses.

They inspected many. There was no unnecessary formality about permission
to look, no “Enquire of Messrs. So and So,” no big key to procure from
anywhere. The ticca-gharry[12] stopped, and they alighted. If the high
wooden gates were closed, Mr. Browne beat upon them lustily with his
stick, shouting, “Qui hai!”[13] in tones of severe authority. Then,
usually from a small and dingy domicile near the gate, issued a figure
hastily, a lean, brown figure, in a dirty dhoty, that salaamed
perfunctorily, and stood before them waiting.

Footnote 12:

  Hired carriage.

Footnote 13:

  Whoever is!

“Iska ghur kali hai?”[14] Mr. Browne would inquire and the figure would
answer, “Ha!”

Footnote 14:

  Is this house empty?

Whereat, without further parley, the Brownes would enter the place and
begin to express their minds about it. Generally it invited criticism.
If the previous sahib had been but three weeks departed the place had an
overgrown look, the bushes were unkempt, the grass ragged; there were
cracks in the mortar and stains on the walls; within it smelt of
desolation. Helen investigated daintily; it looked, she said, so very
“snaky.” The general features of one house were very like the general
features of another; that is to say, their disadvantages were fairly
equal. They all had jungly compounds, they were all more or less
tumble-down, all in fashionable Eurasian neighbourhoods, and all at
least fifty rupees a month more than the Brownes could afford to pay.
Helen found some æsthetic charm, and young Browne some objectionable
odour in every one of them. She, one might say, used nothing but her
eyes, he nothing but his nose. With regard to the attractions of one
address in particular they came almost to a difference of opinion. It
was a bungalow, and it sat down flatly in a luxuriant tangle of
beaumontia, and bougainvilliers, and trailing columbine. It had a
veranda all roundabout, and the veranda was a bower of creeping things.
Not only cocoanut palms, but date palms, and areca palms, and toddy
palms grew in the corners of the compound with hibiscus bushes all in
crimson flower along the wall, a banyan-tree in the middle, and two
luxuriant peepuls, one on each side, almost meeting over the roof of the
house. The walls and pillars of the bungalow were in delicate tones of
grey and green; close behind it were all the picturesque features of a
native bustee, and immediately in front a lovely reflection of the sky
lay in a mossy tank in places where the water was deep enough. The rent
was moderate: it had been empty a long time.

“George!” Helen exclaimed, “it has been waiting for us.”

George demurred. “It’s far and away the worst place we’ve seen,” he
remarked.

“I think it’s perfectly sweet,” his wife maintained.

“If we took it,” he returned implacably, “within three months two
funerals would occur in this neighbourhood: one would be yours and one
would be mine. I don’t speak of the mortality among the servants. I’ll
just ask the durwan[15] how many sahibs have died here lately. And he
asked the durwan in his own tongue.”

Footnote 15:

  Doorkeeper.

“He says three in the last family, and it was the ‘carab bimar,’ which
is the bad sickness or the cholera, my dear. What a fool of a durwan to
leave in charge of an empty house! If you still think you’d like to have
it, Helen, we can inquire——”

“Oh, _no_!” Helen cried. “Let us go away _at once_!”

“I was going to say—at the undertaker’s for additional accommodation.
But perhaps we had better not take it. Let’s try for something clean.”

I consider that the Brownes were very lucky in the end. They found a
house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had already
survived for several years, at a rent they thought they could afford by
careful managing. It turned its face aside from the street and looked
towards the south; sitting on its roof, they could see far across those
many-laned jungle suburbs where the office baboo[16] lives, and whither
the sahibs go only on horseback. The palm fronds waved thick there,
fringing the red sky duskily when the sun went down. The compound was
neglected, but had sanitary possibilities; there was enough grass for a
tennis-court and enough space for a garden. A low line of godowns ran
round two sides of it, where the servants might live and the pony. Palms
and plantains grew in the corners. It was very tropical, and it was
inclosed by a wall coloured to match the house, in the cracks of which
sprouted every green thing. The house itself was pink, which Helen
declared her one disappointment: she preferred the yellow ones so much.
Inside it was chiefly light green, stencilled in yellow by way of
dadoes, which must have been trying, though Helen never admitted it.
There were other peculiarities. The rafters curved downwards and the
floor sloped toward the middle and in various other directions. In
several places trailing decorations in mud had been arranged by white
ants. None of the doors had locks or bolts; they all opened inwards and
were fastened from the inside with movable bars. The outermost room had
twelve French windows; the innermost room had no windows and was quite
dark when its doors were shut. Irregular holes appeared at intervals
over the wall for the accommodation of punkah-ropes, each tenant having
fancied a different seat outside for his punkah-wallah. Two or three
small apartments upstairs in the rear of the house had corners divided
off by partitions about six inches high. These were bath-rooms, arranged
on the simple principle of upsetting the bath-tub on the floor and
letting the water run out of a hole in the wall inside the partition.
Most of the windows had glass in them, but not all, and some were
protected by iron bars, the domestic conditions inside having been
originally Aryan and jealous.

Footnote 16:

  Native clerk.

I do not wish it to be supposed from these details, that the Brownes
were subjected to exceptional hardships, or took up housekeeping under
particularly obscure circumstances. On the contrary, so few people with
their income in Calcutta could afford to live in houses at all, that
young Browne had his name put up on the gatepost with considerable pride
and circumstance. “George W. Browne,” in white letters on a black
ground, in the middle of an oblong wooden tablet, according to the
custom of the place. The fact being that the characteristics of the
Brownes’ house are common, in greater or less degree, to every house in
Calcutta. I venture to say that even the tub of a Member of Council, on
five thousand rupees a month, is discharged through a hole in the wall.

Perhaps their landlord was more or less unique. The landlord common to
Calcutta is a prosperous Jew, a brocaded Rajah, at least an unctuous
baboo fattened upon dhol-bat and chutney. The Brownes’ landlord wore a
pair of dirty white trousers and a lean and hungry look, his upper parts
being clad in yards of soiled cotton, in which he also muffled up his
head. He followed them about the place in silent humility—they took him
for a coolie, and young Browne treated his statements with brevity,
turning a broad British back upon him. I don’t think this enhanced the
rent; I fancy it would have been equally extortionate in any case. But
it was only when Mr. Browne asked where the landlord was to be found
that he proudly disclosed his identity, with apologetic reference,
however, to the state of his attire. He said that his house had been
vacant for many months, and that he had just spent a thousand rupees in
repairing it. His prospective tenant accepted the first of these
statements, and received the second with open laughter. They closed the
bargain, however, and as the landlord occupied an adjoining bustee, and
was frequently to be met in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Browne was for some
time uncertain as to whether she ought to bow to him or not.

[Illustration: MRS. BROWNE WAS FOR SOME TIME UNCERTAIN WHETHER SHE OUGHT
TO BOW TO HIM OR NOT.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER VI.


THERE are a number of ways of furnishing a house in Calcutta. I, who
have known the ins and outs of the place for twenty odd years, have
learned the unsatisfactoriness of all of them, and am prepared to
explain. You can be elaborately done up by a fine _belati_ upholsterer,
who will provide you with spindle-legged chairs in velvet brocade, and
æsthetic window curtains with faded pink roses on them, everything only
about six months behind the London shops, with prices however
considerably in advance. This way is popular with Viceroys. Or you may
go to the ordinary shops and get Westbourne Grove sorts of things only
slightly depreciated as to value and slightly enhanced as to cost,
paying cash—a way usually adopted by people of no imagination. Or you
may attend the auction sale that speeds the departure of some home-going
memsahib, and buy her effects for a song: but that must be at the
beginning of the hot weather, when the migration of memsahibs occurs. Or
you can go to Bow Bazar, where all things are of honourable antiquity,
and there purchase pathetic three-legged memorials of old Calcutta,
springless oval-backed sofas that once upheld the ponderous dignity of
the East India Company, tarnished mirrors which may have reflected the
wanton charms of Madame Le Grand. Baboos sell them, taking knowledge
only of their outward persons and their present utility; and they stand
huddled in little hot low-roofed shops, intimate with the common
teak-wood things of yesterday, condescending to gaudy Japanese vases and
fly-blown coloured prints and cracked lamps and mismatched crockery. Bow
Bazar is not always bad and it is always cheap, granting some previous
experience of baboo morals, and the proprietors charge you nothing for
the poetry of your bargain. They set it off, perhaps, against necessary
repairs. This is not a popular way, as the baboos will testify, but it
is a pleasing one, and it is the way the Brownes took in the main,
supplementing these plenishings with a few from the China Bazar, where a
multitude of the almond-eyed sell you wicker chairs and tables.

It is a divinely simple thing to furnish a house in India. It must be
cleaned and it must be matted. This is done in a certain number of hours
while you sleep, or ride, or walk, or take your pleasure, by a God of
Immediate Results, whom you colloquially dub the “bearer,” working
through an invisible agency of coolies. Then you may go and live in it
with two chairs and a table if you like, and people will only think you
have a somewhat immoderate hatred of hangings and furniture and other
obstacles to the free circulation of air. This you might easily possess
to an extreme, and nobody will consider you any the worse for it. I
should have added an “almirah” to the list of your necessaries, however.
You would be criticised if you had not one or more almirahs. An almirah
is a wardrobe, unless it contains shelves instead of hooks, and then it
is a tall cupboard with doors. Almirahs, therefore, receive all your
personal property, from a dressing-gown to a box of sardines, and it is
not possible to live decently or respectably in India without them. But
the rest is at your good pleasure, and nobody will expect you to have
anything but plated forks and bazar china. Outward circumstance lies not
in these things, but in the locality of your residence and the size of
your compound. If you wish to add to your dignity, buy another pony; if
you wish to enhance it, let the pony be a horse and the horse a Waler.
But think not to aggrandize yourself in the eyes of your fellow
Anglo-Indians by treasures of Chippendale or of Sèvres, by rare
tapestries or modern masters, or even a piano. Dust and the mosquitoes
and the monsoon war against all these things; but chiefly our
inconstancy to the country. We are in conscious exile here for twenty or
twenty-five years, and there is a general theory that it is too hot and
too expensive to make the exile any more than comfortable. Beside which,
do we not pass a quarter of our existence in the cabins of the P. and
O.? But I must not digress from the Brownes’ experiences to my own
opinions.

The Brownes’ ticca-gharry turned into Bow Bazar out of Chowringhee, out
of Calcutta’s pride among her thoroughfares, broad and clean, and facing
the wide green Maidan, lined with European shops, and populous with the
gharries[17] of the sahibs, into the narrow crookedness of the native
city, where the proprietors are all Baboo This, or Sheik That, who sit
upon the thresholds of their establishments smoking the peaceful
hubble-bubble, and waiting until it please Allah or Lakshmi to send them
a customer. Very manifold are the wants that Bow Bazar provides for,
wants of the sahib, of the “kala sahib,”[18] of its own swarming
population. You can buy a suit of clothes there—oh, very cheap—or a seer
of rice; all sorts of publications in English, Bengali, and Urdu; a
beautiful oil painting for a rupee, a handful of sticky native
sweetmeats for a pice. You can have your beard shaved, your horoscope
cast, your photograph taken, all at a rate which will deeply astonish
you. There is a great deal of noise in the Bow Bazar, coming chiefly
from strenuous brown throats, a great deal of dust, a great number and
variety of odours. But there the sahiblok, in the midst of luxury, can
enjoy economy—and you can’t have everything.

Footnote 17:

  Carriages.

Footnote 18:

  “Black sahibs,” i.e. Eurasians.

The sellers of sahib’s furniture have the largest shops in Bow Bazar,
and the heaviest stock; they are important among the merchants; they
often speak a little English. The baboo to whom the Brownes first
addressed themselves had this accomplishment, and he wore the dual
European garment of white duck, and a coat. He was a short baboo, very
black, with a round face so expressive of a sense of humour that young
Browne remarked to Helen privately that he was sure the fellow had some
European blood in him, in spite of the colour—no pukka Bengali ever
grinned like that!

“What iss it, sir, that it iss your wish to buy?” he inquired. He spoke
so rapidly that his words seemed the output of one breath; yet they were
perfectly distinct. It is the manner of the native who speaks English,
and the East Indians have borrowed it from him.

“Oh! we want to buy a lot of things, Baboo!” said Mr. Browne,
familiarly, “at half your regular prices, and a large discount for cash!
What have you got? Got any chairs?”

“Oh yess indeed; certainlee! Will you please to come this way?”

“This way” led through a labyrinth of furniture, new and old, of glass
and crockery and chipped ornaments, a dusty haven of dismayed household
gods. “What have you got in there, Baboo?” asked young Browne, as they
passed an almirah revealing rows of tins and labels.

“Stores, sir,—verree best qualitty stores. You can see fo’ you’self,
sir—Crosse an’ Blackwell——”

“Oh yes, Baboo! And how long did you say they’d been there?”

“Onlee _one_ month, sir,” the baboo replied, attempting an expression of
surprise and injury. “I can tell you the name of the ship they arrived
in, sir.”

“Of course you can, Baboo. But never mind. We don’t want any to-day.
Let’s see the chairs. Now, Helen,” he continued, as the baboo went on in
advance, “you see what we are subject to in this ungodly place. Those
pease and gooseberries and asparaguses have probably been in Calcutta a
good deal longer than I have. They look like old sojourners; I wouldn’t
give them a day under six years. They are doubtless very cheap, but
think, Helen, of what _might_ happen to my inside if you gave me green
pease out of Bow Bazar!” Mrs. Browne looked aghast. “But I never will,
George!” said she, solemnly. And young Browne made her vow it there and
then. “There are two or three decent European shops here,” he said, with
unction, “where they make a point of not poisoning more people than they
can help. You pay rather largely for that comfortable assurance, I
believe, but it’s worth having. I’d have more faith in the stability of
the family, Helen, if you would promise always to go to them for tinned
things.”

Helen promised effusively, and it is to her credit that she always
informed young Browne, before consumption, whenever a domestic exigency
made her break her word.

They climbed up a dark and winding stair that led out upon a flat roof,
crossed the roof and entered a small room, borrowed from the premises of
some other baboo. “Hold your skirts well up, Helen; it’s just the place
for centipedes,” her husband remarked callously; and Mrs. Browne
exhibited a disregard for her ankles that would have been remarkable
under any other circumstances.

[Illustration: IT’S JUST THE PLACE FOR CENTIPEDES.]

“Here, you see, sir, all the chairs,” stated the little baboo, waving
his hand. “I must tell you, sir, that some are off teak and some off
shisham wood. Thee shisham are the superior.”

“You mean, baboo,” said young Browne, seriously, “that the shisham are
the less inferior. That’s a better way of putting it, baboo.”

“Perhaps so, sir. Yessir, doubtless you are right, sir. The less
inferior—the more grammatical!”

“Precisely. And now about the prices, baboo. What is your exact
overcharge for fellows like this? He’s shisham, isn’t he? And he’s about
as sound as any of ’em.”

“_Best_ shisham, sir—perfeckkly sound—_not_ secon’ hand—our own make.
Feel the weight of thiss, sir!”

“All right, baboo—I know. What’s the price?”

“If thee ladee will just sit down in it for a minit shee will see how
comfortable it iss!”

“Trifle no longer, baboo—what’s the dom?”

“The price off that chair, sir, is _eight_ rupees.”

Mr. Browne sank into it with a pretence at gasping. “You can’t mean
that, baboo. Nothing like that. Eight rupees! You’re dreaming, baboo.
You forget that you only paid two for it. You’re dreaming, baboo—or
you’re joking!”

Hurry Doss Mitterjee smiled in deep appreciation of the gentleman’s
humour. He even chuckled, with a note of deprecation.

“Ah, no, sir! You will pardon me for saying that is a mistake, sir! In
_bissiness_ I doo not joke, never! For those chairs I pay _seven_ rupees
four annas, sir! It iss a small profit but it iss contentable. I doo
_not_ ask more, sir!”

“This is very sad, baboo!” said Mr. Browne seriously. “This is very sad,
indeed! I understood that you were a person of probity, who never asked
more than a hundred per cent. But I know the value of shisham chairs,
and this is four hundred—Oh, very sad, indeed! Now see here, I’ll give
you three rupees apiece for these chairs, and take six.”

“Salaam!” said the baboo, touching his forehead with ironical gratitude
and pushing back the chair. “Nossir!”

“You may take them at coss price, sir—at seven four you may take them,
and I make no profit: but perhaps I get your custom. Take them—_seven_
four!”

Mr. Browne turned away with a slight sigh. “Come along, dear,” he said
to his wife, “this man sells only to Rajahs and Members of Council.”

The baboo ignored the pleasantry this time—the moment had come for
action. “_What_ do you give, sir?” he said, following them—“for the sake
off bissiness, _what_ do you give?”

“Four rupees!”

“Five eight!”

“Four eight, baboo—there!”

“Ah, sir, I cannot. Believe _me_ they coss five eight to buy!”

“Look here, baboo—I’ll give you five rupees apiece for six of those
shisham wood chairs, every one as good as this, and I’ll pay you when
you send them—that’s thirty rupees—and not another pice! Helen, be
careful of these steps.”

“To what address, sir? Will to-morrow morning be sufficient early, sir?”

“George!” exclaimed Helen, as they reached the outer world of Bow Bazar,
“what a horrid little cheat of a man! Did you hear him say at first that
they cost seven four to make?”

“Oh, my dear,” young Browne responded, superiorly. “That’s a trifle! You
don’t know the baboo.”

“Well!” said his wife, admiringly, “I don’t know how you kept your
patience, George!”

Whereat Mr. Browne looked still more superior, and informed Mrs. Browne
that the only way to deal with these fellows was to chaff ’em; make up
your mind in the beginning that you’re going to be done in the eye, and
act accordingly. They always score, he added, with true Anglo-Indian
resignation.

They bought a table next, from a very fat old gentleman—simply clad—in a
beard and a dhoty.[19] The beard and the dhoty were much the same
colour, and both fell so abundantly about his person that it would be
difficult to say which was most useful to him as an article of apparel.
And his moral obliquity was concealed under more rolls and pads of
oily-brown adipose tissue than could often be seen in Bow Bazar. He must
have been a rascal, as young Browne said, or being a Hindu he wouldn’t
have had a beard.

Footnote 19:

  Cloth for legs.

It was a small mahogany dining table, second-hand, and its owner wanted
twenty rupees for it.

“I _think_,” said young Browne, “that the memsahib might give you
fourteen!”

The usual humbly sarcastic salaam—it was a very excellent table—the
baboo could not think of parting with it for that.

“All right!” said Mr. Browne, “the memsahib says she won’t give more
than fourteen, and that’s very dear. But I’ll make you one offer—just
one, mind, baboo! I’ll give you fifteen. Now take it or leave it—one
word!”

The baboo salaamed so that his beard swept the ground, and fervently
refused.

“Very well, baboo! Now I don’t want it at any price, see if you can
bargain with the memsahib.”

“_Eight_een rupees, memsahib!” insinuated the old fellow, “very cheap.”

“No, indeed!” Helen exclaimed with indignation, rising to the occasion,
“I won’t give you any more than fourteen.”

“_Chowdrah rupia, memsahib—fo_-teen rupee! But the sahib he offer
fifteen!”

“Oh, I don’t want it at all now,” said the sahib, who stood in the door
with his back turned and whistled. “Now you must bargain with the
memsahib.”

The baboo looked at his customers anxiously for a moment. “For sixteen
rupees you take it,” he said.

“Don’t want it,” responded Mr. Browne.

“Alright—for fifteen?”

“Will you give him fifteen, Helen?”

“Certainly not, dear! Fourteen.”

“Fifteen the sahib _say_ he give!” cried the baboo, his beard wagging
with righteous reproach. “Take it for fifteen!” But Mr. and Mrs. Browne
had made their way out. The baboo followed reminding and entreating for
a hundred yards. They were deaf. Then he wheeled round upon them in
front. “Very well, you give me fourteen?” The Brownes went back and left
their address, which was weak in them, I consider; but I have no doubt
that to this day that bearded baboo considers himself an injured person,
and the victim of a most disastrous _bandobust_.[20]

Footnote 20:

  Bargain.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER VII.


“LET’S have them up!” said Mr. Browne.

Mr. Browne was smoking a cigar after breakfast in his own house. There
had been a time when Mr. Browne smoked his morning cigar on his way to
office, but that was formerly. The department of the tea interest
entrusted to Mr. Browne by his firm did not receive his active personal
superintendence to the usual extent during the early months of the cold
weather of ’91. I am aware of this because my husband is a senior
partner. Not that the firm minded particularly—they liked young Browne,
and I know that we were rather pleased at the time that he had
discovered something in the world besides tea.

The Brownes had been settled some two or three days, and the wheels of
their domestic arrangements had been running with that perfection of
unobtrusive smoothness that can be fully experienced only in India, so
far as I know. The meals had appeared and disappeared as by magic, the
rooms had been swept and dusted and garnished while there was no eye to
see, their wishes had been anticipated, their orders had been carried
out in the night, as it seemed.

“Let’s have ’em up!” suggested Mr. Browne, with reference to the
mysterious agents of all this circumstance. Helen wanted to see her
servants.

“Bear-_er_!” shouted the sahib, young Browne.

“_Hazur!_”[21] came the answer, in deep tones, from regions below, with
a sound of bare feet hastily ascending the stair.

Footnote 21:

  Your honour.

“_Hazur bolya?_”[22] enquired the bearer in a subdued voice, partially
presenting himself at the door.

Footnote 22:

  Your honour called.

“Ha!” said young Browne, “_Dekko_,[23] bearer! You may _sub nokar lao.
Sumja? Memsahib dekna muncta!_”[24]

Footnote 23:

  Look!

Footnote 24:

   Bring all the servants. Do you understand? The memsahib wants to see
  them.

“_Bahut atcha!_”[25] responded the bearer, and retired.

Footnote 25:

   Very good.

Helen sat up very straight, a little nervous air of apprehension mingled
with her dignity. It had been no flippant business in her experience, to
interview even a prospective under-housemaid, and presently she would be
confronted by a whole retinue. “Why are they so long?” she asked.

“They’re putting on their clean clothes, and perhaps a little oil in
your honour, my dear. They wish to make as radiant an appearance as
possible.” And in a few minutes later the Brownes’ domestic staff
followed its leader into the room, where it stood abashed, hands hanging
down, looking at the floor. The bearer made a respectful showman’s
gesture and awaited the pleasure of the sahib.

The sahib regarded them quizzically, and softly smoked on, with crossed
legs.

“Dear me!” said Helen; “what a lot!”

“They are people of infinite leisure, my dear. The accomplishment of any
one thing requires a great many of them. Above all it is necessary that
they have peace and long hours to sleep, and an uninterrupted period in
which to cook their rice and wash and anoint themselves. You will soon
find out their little ways. Now let me explain. They don’t understand a
word of English.

“The bearer you know. The bearer brought all the rest and is responsible
for them. I have no doubt that he is in honoured receipt of at least
half their first month’s wages for securing their situations for them.
He is their superior officer, and is a person of weight and influence
among them, and he’s a very intelligent man. I’ve had him four years. In
that time he has looked after me very well, I consider, very well
indeed. He knows all about my clothes and keeps them tidy—buys a good
many of ’em—socks and ties and things,—takes care of my room, rubs me
down every evening before dinner,—keeps my money.”

“Keeps your _money_, George!”

“Oh, yes! one can’t be bothered with money in this country.”

“Well!” said his wife. “I think it’s quite _time_ you were married,
George. Go on!”

George said something irrelevantly foolish and went on.

“He’s perfectly honest, my dear—entirely so. It would be altogether
beneath his dignity to misappropriate. And I’ve always found him
moderate in his overcharges. I took him partly because he had good chits
and good manners, and partly because of his ingenuousness. I wanted a
man for nine rupees—this chap stood out for ten. By way of argument he
remarked that he would probably be purchasing a great many things for
the sahib in the bazar—that the sahib might as well give ten in the
first place! I thought there was a logical acumen about that that one
didn’t come across every day, and engaged him on the spot.”

“But, George—it’s—it’s almost immoral!”

“Very, my dear! But you’ll find it saves a lot of trouble.”

Helen compressed her pretty lips in a way that spoke of a stern
determination to adhere to the principles in vogue in Canbury.

“And I wouldn’t advise you to interfere with him too much, Helen, or
he’ll pray to be allowed to go to his _mulluk_,[26] and we shall lose a
good servant. Of course, I’m obliged to jump down his throat once a
month or so—they all need that—but I consider him a gentleman, and I
never hurt his feelings. You observe the size of his turban, and the
dignity of his bearing generally? Well, so much for the bearer—he gets
ten rupees.”

Footnote 26:

  Own country.

“I’ve put it down, George.”

“Now the kitmutgar—he’s another old servant of mine—the gentleman who
has just salaamed to you. You see by his dress that he’s a Mussulman. No
self-respecting Hindu, as you’ve read in books of travel which
occasionally contain a truth—will wait on you at table. Observe his
nether garments how they differ from the bearer’s. The B. you see wears
a dhoty.”

“A kind of twisted sheet,” remarked Helen.

“Precisely. And this man a regular divided skirt. The thing he wears on
his head is not a dinner plate covered with white cotton, as one
naturally imagines, but another form of Mussulman millinery—I’m sure I
don’t know what. But you’re never to let him appear in your presence
without it. It would be rank disrespect.

“He is also an old servant,” Mr. Browne went on, “because servants do
get old in the course of time if one doesn’t get rid of them, and I’ve
given up trying to get rid of this one. He’s a regular old granny, as
you can see from his face; he’s infuriatingly incompetent—always poking
things at a man that a man doesn’t want when a man’s got a liver. But he
doesn’t understand being told to go. I dismissed him every day for a
week last hot weather: he didn’t allow it to interfere with him in the
least—turned up behind my chair next morning as regularly as ever—chose
to regard it as a pleasantry of the sahib’s. When I went to England, to
get engaged to you, my dear, I told him I desired never to look upon his
face again. It was the first one I saw when the ship reached the P. and
O. jetty. And there was a smile on it! What could I do! And that very
night he shot me in the shirt-front with a soda-water bottle. I hand him
over to you, my dear—you’ll find he’ll stay.”

“I like him,” said Mrs. Browne, “and I think his conduct has been very
devoted, George. And he doesn’t cheat?”

“He has no particular opportunity. Now for the cook. This is the cook, I
take it. You see he wears nothing on his head but his hair, and that’s
cut short. Also he wears his particular strip of muslin draped about his
shoulders, toga-wise. Also he is of a different cast of countenance,
broader, higher cheek-bones, more benevolent. Remotely he’s got a strain
of Chinese blood in him—he’s probably Moog from Chittagong.”

“_Tum bawarchi hai, eh?_”[27]

Footnote 27:

  You are the cook?

“_Gee-ha!_”[28]

Footnote 28:

  Worthy one, yes.

“_Tum Moog hai?_”[29]

Footnote 29:

  You are a Moog?

“_Gee-ha!_”

“He is, you see. Most of the cooks are, and all of them pretend to be.”

“_Tum sub cheese junta, eh, bawarchi!_”[30]

Footnote 30:

  You know everything?

“_Gee-ha, hazur! Hum atcha issoup sumja—atcha si’dish sumja, atcha
eepudin sumja—subcheese khana kawasti teke sumja! Chittie hai
hazur._”[31]

Footnote 31:

  I know good soup, good sidedishes, good puddings. Everything for
  dinner I know well. Here are recommendations, your honour.

“He says he’s a treasure, my dear, but that’s a modest statement they
all make. And he wishes to show you his chits; will you condescend to
look at them?”

“What are his chits?” Helen inquired.

“His certificates from other people whose digestions he has ruined from
time to time. Let’s see—‘Kali Bagh, cook’—that’s his name apparently,
but you needn’t remember it, he’ll always answer to ‘Bawarchi!’—‘has
been in my service eighteen months, and has generally given
satisfaction. He is as clean as any I have ever had, fairly honest, and
not inclined to be wasteful. He is dismissed for no fault, but because I
am leaving India.’ H’m! I don’t think much of chits! This one probably
ought to read, ‘He doesn’t get drunk often, but he’s lazy, unpunctual,
and beats his wife. He has cooked for me eighteen months, because I have
been too weak-minded to dismiss him. He now goes by force of
circumstances!’ But it’s not a bad chit.”

“I don’t consider it a very good one,” said Helen. “As clean as any I
have ever had!”

“That’s his profoundest recommendation, my dear! He probably does _not_
make toast with his toes.

“People are utterly devoid of scruple about chits,” Mr. Browne went on,
running over the dirty envelopes and long-folded half-sheets of
letter-paper. “I’ve known men, who wouldn’t tell a lie under any other
circumstances to—to save their souls, calmly sit down and write fervent
recommendations of the most whopping blackguards, in the joyful moment
of their deliverance, over their own names, perfectly regardless of the
immorality of the thing. It’s a curious example of the way the natives’
desire to be obliging at any cost comes off on us. Now here’s a memsahib
who ought to be ashamed of herself—‘Kali Bagh is a capital cook. His
entrées are delicious, and he always sends up a joint done to
perfection. His puddings are perhaps his best point, but his vegetables
are quite French. I can thoroughly recommend him to anyone wanting a
really first-rate chef.—Mary L. Johnson.’ Now we don’t want a chef, this
man isn’t a chef, and Mary L. Johnson never had a chef. I knew the
lady—she was the wife of Bob Johnson of the Jumna Bank—and they hadn’t a
pice more to live on than we have! _Chef_—upon my word. And yet,” said
young Browne thoughtfully, “I’ve had some very decent plain dinners at
Bob Johnson’s.”

“But what’s the use of chits, George, if people don’t believe in them?”

“Oh, they do believe in ’em implicitly, till they find out the horrible
mendacity of ’em. Then they rage about it and send the fellow off, with
another excellent chit! And one would never engage a servant _without_
chits, you know. You see how they value them—this man’s date back to
‘79. Here’s a break, two years ago.—What sahib’s cook were you two years
ago, Bawarchi?” asked Mr. Browne.

“Exactly! I thought so, he paid a visit to his mulluk two years
ago—that’s his own country. In other words, he got a bad chit from that
sahib and was compelled to destroy it. They have always visited their
mulluks under those circumstances, for the length of time corresponding
to the break. But I guess he’ll do—we mustn’t expect too much. Twelve
rupees.”

The cook took his chits back and salaamed. Helen looked as if she
thought a great deal more might be desired in a cook, but could not
bring herself to the point of discussing it in his immediate presence.

“He seems so very intelligent,” she said to herself with a qualm.

“Now then, for the mussalchi! _Tum mussalchi hai_, eh?”

“Gee-ha, hazur!”

The mussalchi wore a short cotton coat, a dhoty, and an expression of
dejection. On his head was a mere suggestion of a turban—an abject rag.
Written upon his face was a hopeless longing to become a bawarchi, which
fate forbade. Once a mussalchi, the son of a mussalchi, always a
mussalchi, the bearer of hot water and a dish-cloth, the receiver of
orders from kitmutgars.

“Consider your mussalchi, Helen! He is engaged to wash the dishes, to
keep the silver clean, and the pots and pans. His real mission is to
break as many as possible, and to levy large illegal charges upon you
monthly for knife-polish and mops. In addition he’ll carry the basket
home from the market every morning on his head—the cook, you know, is
much too swagger for that! Think he’ll do?”

“I don’t know,” said Helen in unhappy indecision. “What do _you_ think,
George?”

“Oh we’ll try him, and I suppose he’ll have to get seven rupees. This is
the mallie, the gardener—this gentleman with his hair done up neatly
behind.”

“Nice clean-looking man,” remarked Helen, “but oughtn’t he to wear more
clothes.”

“Looks like a decent chap. No, I should say not; I never saw a mallie
with more on. You see he’s a very superior person, a Brahmin in fact. He
wears the sacred string, as well as his beads and his dhoty; do you see
it, over his right shoulder and under his left arm. He claims to have
been ‘twice born.’ They’re generally of a very respectable _jat_[32] the
mallies.”

Footnote 32:

  Caste.

“He will take care of the garden,” remarked Helen.

“As we happen to have a garden, yes. But his business is to produce
flowers. You want flowers, you engage a mallie. You get flowers. This
process of logic is perfectly simple to the native mind. It is nothing
but justice and sweet reason. A mallie is a person who causes flowers to
appear.”

“But where does he get them?”

“Oh, my dear, that is one of the secrets of his profession. But I
understand that there’s a very wise and liberal understanding amongst
mallies—and quite a number of mallies have gardens attached to them.
There’s a very old story about a mallie’s chit which you haven’t heard
yet. His departing master gave him an excellent character and summed up
by saying: ‘This mallie has been with me fifteen years. I have had no
garden, I have never lacked flowers, and he has never had a
conviction.’”

“George—do you mean to say they steal!”

“Oh, no, my dear! It’s a matter of arrangement. This man could never
take flowers out of another sahib’s garden without consulting the other
sahib’s mallie—that would be very wrong. But we’ll see if he can’t grow
us some for ourselves.”

“But the other sahib.”

“The other sahib is similarly obliged from somebody else’s garden, and
doesn’t know anything about it. Eight rupees for the mallie.”

Helen put it down with inquietude of spirit.

“Now for the syce, who looks after the pony. I’ve had the syce two or
three years, too. He’s a very good servant now, but he used to give me a
lot of trouble by pure laziness. Once he let a pony of mine get a sore
back, and never told me, and I licked him. I licked him well, and I
consider that licking made a man of him. He realized gradually—he’s a
stupid chap—that it was undesirable to be licked, especially in the
compound with the other servants looking on, and instead of throwing up
his place and bringing me before the magistrate for assault, he
concluded that he wouldn’t let it happen again. It never has, and he has
respected himself and me more ever since.”

“Do you often ‘lick’ them, George?”

“Except this once I never have. Neither does anybody else, except a few
ill-conditioned young cubs, who haven’t been out long enough to
understand the native and think they can kick him about to advantage.
But decent servants never stay with such men. Indeed they can’t get ’em.
You’ve got to have a good character to get good servants, and there
isn’t a sahib in Calcutta that hasn’t a reputation in the bazar. The
bearer knows perfectly well I wouldn’t touch a hair of his head, and if
the bearer went out with cholera to-morrow I could get half a dozen as
good in his place. On the other hand, probably all the kitmutgar-lok
despise me for keeping such a poor servant as the Kit, and I’d have a
difficulty in getting a better one.”

“Curious!” said Helen.

“Yes. The syce, my dear, will desire you to pay for quite twice as much
grain and grass as the pony consumes, and for a time you will do it.
Bye-and-bye you will acquire the wisdom of a serpent and cut him
accordingly. In the meantime he’s bound to have as much sugar-cane on
hand as you want to feed the pony with, at a fixed charge of four annas
a month. Don’t forget that the syce’s tulub is eight rupees.

“This very smug and smiling person is the dhoby, the washerwoman. He is
an unmitigated rascal. There is no palliation for anything he does. He
carries off your dirty linen every week in a very big pack on a very
little donkey, and brings it home on the same, beating the donkey all
the way there and all the way back. He mismatches your garments with
other people’s, he washes them with country soap that smells to heaven
if you don’t watch him. His custom in cleaning them is to beat them
violently between two large and jagged stones. He combines all the vices
of his profession upon the civilized globe; but I’m afraid you’ll have
to find out for yourself, dear. Put down the dhoby at ten.

“This excessively modest person is the bheesty, who brings us water
every day in a goat-skin. He isn’t used to polite society, but he’s a
very worthy and hard-working sort. He’s only a ticca-bheesty. I fancy
several people about here use him. You see his sole business in life is
carrying water about in goat-skins. So we only give him three rupees.

“The sweeper is out on the veranda. Very properly he doesn’t venture
into our presence. He is of very low caste—does the sweeping and all the
menial work, you know. You are never to see or speak to him, or you’ll
be lowered in the respect of the compound. The sweeper is a very poor
sort of person—he is the only servant in the place that will eat the
remains of our food. He gets six rupees.”

“Is that all?” asked Helen. “I’m sure I don’t know them apart.”

“That’s all, except your ayah, who isn’t here, and a _durwan_ to keep
the door, whom we’ll get when we’re richer, and a _dhurzie_ to mend our
clothes, whom we’ll get when they begin to wear out. May they be
dismissed now?”

[Illustration: A VERY WORTHY AND HARD-WORKING SORT.]

“Oh, yes, _please_!” said Helen, and “_Bahut atcha? Tum jane
sucta_,”[33] remarked her husband, whereat they salaamed and departed in
single file.

Footnote 33:

  You may go.

“But George,” said Helen, “they come, with my ayah at eleven, to
eighty-five rupees a month! Almost seven pounds! I thought servants were
cheap in India!”

“No, dear, they’re not; at least, not in Calcutta. And these are the
very least we can have to be at all comfortable.”

The two Brownes looked at each other with a slight shade of domestic
anxiety. This was dispelled by the foolish old consideration of how
little anything really mattered, now that they were one Browne, and
presently they were disporting themselves behind the pony on the Maidan,
leaving the cares of their household to those who were most concerned in
them.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER VIII.


A WEEK later Helen took over the accounts. In the meantime she had
learned to count rupees and annas, pi and pice, also a few words of that
tongue in which orders are given in Calcutta. She arose on the seventh
morning of her tenure of office rigidly determined that the office
should no longer be a sinecure. She would drop curiosity and pleasure,
and assume discipline, righteousness and understanding. She would make a
stand. She would deal justly, but she would make a stand. It would be
after George had gone to office. When he came home, tired with tea
affairs, he would not be compelled to rack his brain further with the
day’s marketing. He would see that the lady he had made Mrs. Browne was
capable of more than driving about in a tum-tum and writing enthusiastic
letters home about the beauties of Calcutta.

George went to office. The kitmutgar softly removed the blue and white
breakfast things. Outside the door, in the “bottle khana,” the
mussalchi, squatting, washed them in an earthen bowl with a mop-stick.
It occurred to Helen that she might as well begin by going to look at
the mussalchi, and she did. She looked at him with a somewhat severe
expression, thereby causing him dismay and terror. She walked all round
the mussalchi, but found nothing about him to criticise. “But,
probably,” thought she, as she went back to the dining-room, “my looking
at him had its moral effect.” Then she sent for the cook.

The cook arrived with an expression of deep solemnity, tempered by all
the amiable qualities you can think of. He held in his hand an extremely
dirty piece of paper, covered with strange characters in Nagri—how
little anybody would have thought, when they were designed in the dawn
of the world, that they would ever be used to indicate the items of an
Englishman’s dinner! The cook put a pair of spectacles on to read them,
which completed the anomaly, and made him look more benevolent than
ever.

“Well, bawarchi,” said Helen, ready with pencil and note-book, “account
hai?”

“Gee-ha, hai!” responded he. Then after a respectful pause, “S’in-beef,”
he said, “_char anna_.”

“Shin beef,” repeated Helen, with satisfaction, “four annas. Yes?”

“Fiss—che[34] anna. Bress mutton—egrupee, che anna. Eggis—satrah—aht[35]
anna.”

Footnote 34:

  Six.

Footnote 35:

  Eight.

“_Seventeen_ eggs, bawarchi? When did we eat seventeen eggs? How did we
eat seventeen eggs yesterday?”

Mrs. Browne spoke impulsively, in English, but Kali Bagh seemed to
understand, and with an unruffled front proceeded to account
circumstantially for every egg. His mistress was helpless. But,
“to-morrow,” thought she earnestly, “I will _see_ whether he puts four
in the soup!”

The cook went on to state that since yesterday the Browne family had
consumed three seers of potatoes—six pounds—at two annas a seer, which
would be six annas. “And I don’t believe that, either,” mentally
ejaculated Mrs. Browne, but Kali Bagh continued without flinching. He
chronicled salt, pepper, sauce, sugar, he mentioned rice, dhal,
“garden-isspice,” “guava isstew,” “k’rats,”[36] “kiss-miss,”[37]
“maida,”[38] and enough “mukkan”[39] to have supplied a charity-school.
Helen was amazed to find the number of culinary articles which
undeniably might have been used in the course of twenty-four hours—she
did not consider the long calm evening that went to meditation over the
list. When it was finished she found that the day’s expenses in food had
been exactly eight rupees six annas, or about eleven shillings. Helen
had had a thrifty education, and she knew this was absurd. She turned to
the flagrant eggs and to the unblushing potatoes, and she made a
calculation.

Footnote 36:

  Carrots.

Footnote 37:

  Raisins.

Footnote 38:

  Flour.

Footnote 39:

   Butter.

“Bawarchi!” said she, “Potatoes—four annas. Eggs—five annas,
_daga_.”[40]

Footnote 40:

   I will give.

“Bahut atcha!” said the cook, without remonstrance. He still had
twenty-five per cent of profit.

Helen observed, and was encouraged. She summoned up her sternest look,
and drew her pencil through the total. “Eight rupees,” she remarked with
simplicity, “daga na. _Five_ rupees daga,” and she closed the book.

Kali Bagh looked at her with an expression of understanding, mingled
with disappointment. He did not expect all he asked, but he expected
more than he got. As it was, his profit amounted only to two rupees, not
much for a poor man with a family. But in after days, when his memsahib
grew in general sagacity and particular knowledge of the bazar, Kali
Bagh had reason to look back regretfully to those two rupees as to the
brief passing of a golden age.

“I will now go down,” said Mrs. Browne with enthusiasm, “and look at his
pots.”

The compound, as she crossed it, was full of the eternal sunlight of
India, the gay shrill gossip of the mynas, the hoarse ejaculations of
the crows. A flashy little green parrot flew out of a hibiscus bush by
the wall in full crimson flower; he belonged to the jungle. But a pair
of grey pigeons cooed to each other over the building of their nest in
the cornice of a pillar of the Brownes’ upper veranda. They had come to
stay, and they spoke of the advantages of co-operative housekeeping with
another young couple like themselves, knowing it to be on a safe and
permanent basis. The garden was all freshly scratched and tidy; there
was a pleasant smell of earth; the mallie, under a pipal tree, gathered
up its broad dry fallen leaves to cook his rice with. It was a graphic
bit of economy, so pleasantly close to nature that its poetry was plain.
“We are the only people who are extravagant in India,” thought Helen, as
she regarded the mallie, and in this reflection I venture to say that
she was quite correct.

The door of the _bawarchi khana_[41] was open—it was never shut. I am
not sure, indeed, that there was a door. There were certainly no
windows. It is possible that the bawarchi khana was seven feet square,
and its mistress was just able to stand up straight in it with a few
inches to spare. It contained a shelf, a table, and a stove. When Kali
Bagh sat down he used his heels. The shelf and the table were full of
the oil and condiments dear to the heart of every bawarchi. The stove
was an erection like a tenement house, built with what was left over
from the walls, and artistically coloured pink to be like them. It
contained various hollows on the top, in one or two of which charcoal
was glowing—beyond this I cannot explain its construction to be plain to
understandings accustomed to the kitchen ranges of Christianity and
civilisation. But nothing ever went wrong with Kali Bagh’s stove, the
boiler never leaked, the hot water pipes never burst, the oven never
required relining, the dampers never had to be re-regulated. He was its
presiding genius, he worked it with a palm leaf fan, and nothing would
induce him to look at a modern improvement. Kali Bagh was a conservative
institution himself, his recipes were an heritage, he was the living
representative of an immemorial _dustur_.[42] Why should Kali Bagh
afflict himself with the ways of the memsahib!

Footnote 41:

  Cook-house.

Footnote 42:

  Custom.

The bawarchi khana had another door, opening into a rather smaller
apartment, otherwise lightless and airless, which contained Kali Bagh’s
wardrobe and bed. The wardrobe was elementary and hung upon a single
peg, the bed consisted of four short legs and a piece of matting. Kali
Bagh had reposed himself on it, and was already snoring, when Mrs.
Browne came in. He had divested himself of his chuddar and his
spectacles, and looked less of a philosopher and more of an Aryan. Mrs.
Browne made a rude clatter among the pans, which brought him to a sense
of her disturbing presence. Presently she observed him standing behind
her, looking anxious. His mistress sniffed about intrepidly. She lifted
saucepan lids and discovered within remains of concoctions three days
old; she found the day’s milk in an erstwhile kerosene tin; she lifted a
kettle and intruded upon the privacy of a large family of cockroaches,
any one of them as big as a five-shilling piece. Kali Bagh would never
have disturbed them. She found messes and mixtures and herbs and spices
and sauces which she did not understand and could not approve. The day’s
marketing lay in a flat basket under the table. Helen drew it forth and
discovered a live pigeon indiscriminately near the mutton with its wings
twisted around one another at the joint, while from beneath a débris of
potatoes, beans and cauliflower, came a feeble and plaintive “Quack!”

“What is this?” said Mrs. Browne with paler and sterner criticism,
looking into a pot that was bubbling on the fire.

“_Chaul hai, memsahib! Hamara khana!_”[43]

Footnote 43:

  It is rice, memsahib; my dinner.

“Your dinner, bawarchi! All that rice?” And, indeed, therein was no
justification for Kali Bagh. It was not only his dinner, but the dinner
of the sweeper and of the syce and of the mussalchi, to be supplied to
them a trifle below current market rates, and Mrs. Browne had paid for
it all that morning. Helen found herself confronted with her little
domestic corner of the great problem of India—the natives’ “way.” But
she had no language with which to circumvent it or remonstrate with it.
She could only decide that Kali Bagh was an eminently proper subject for
discipline, and resolve to tell George, which was not much of an
expedient. It is exactly what we all do in India, however, under the
circumstances. We tell our superior officers, until at last the Queen
Empress herself is told; and the Queen Empress is quite as incapable of
further procedure as Mrs. Browne; indeed, much more so, for she is
compelled to listen to the voice of her parliamentary wrangling-machine
upon the matter, which obeys the turning of a handle, and is a very fine
piece of mechanism indeed, but not absolutely reliable when it delivers
ready-made opinions upon Aryan problems. At least I am quite sure that
is my husband’s idea, and I have often heard young Browne say the same
thing.

There was a scattering to right and left when Helen reappeared in the
compound. Her domestics were not dressed to receive her, and they ran
this way and that, noiselessly like cockroaches to their respective
holes. There seemed to be a great many of them, more by at least half a
dozen than were properly accredited to the house; and Helen was
afterwards informed that they were the _bhai_[44] of the other servants,
representing a fraction of the great unemployed of Asia, who came daily
for fraternal gossip in the sun and any patronage that might be going.
They were a nuisance, these bhai, and were soon sternly put down by the
arm of the law and the edict of the sahib, who enacted that no strange
native should be allowed to enter the compound without a chit. “It’s the
only way to convince them,” said he, “that the Maidan is the best place
for public meetings.”

Footnote 44:

  Caste-brothers.

[Illustration: “WHAT IS THIS?” SAID MRS. BROWNE, WITH PALER AND STERNER
CRITICISM.]

The quarters of the syce and the pony were the only ones that invited
further inspection. The same roof sheltered both of these creatures of
service, a thatched one; but between them a primitive partition went
half way up. On one side of this the pony was tethered and enjoyed the
luxuries of his dependence, on the other the syce lived in freedom, but
did not fare so well. The pony’s expenses were quite five times as
heavy. His food cost more, his clothes cost more, his medical attendance
cost more, to say nothing of his requiring a valet. He was much the more
valuable animal of the two, though the other is popularly believed in
England to have a soul. His wants were even more elaborately supplied
than the syce’s—he had a trough to feed from, and a pail to drink out
of, a fresh bed every night, a box for his grain, and a curry-comb for
his skin; while the syce’s domestic arrangements consisted of an
earthenware pot, a wooden stick, and a rickety charpoy. When he was cold
he borrowed the pony’s blanket, and I never heard of any toilet articles
in connection with him. The accommodation was not equally divided
between him and the pony, either. The pony had at least twice as much,
and it was in better repair.

The pony looked much askance at Helen. He was accustomed only to the
race of his dark-skinned servitor. The sahib with his white face and
strange talk he associated with the whip and being made to pull an
objectionable construction upon wheels from which he could not get away;
but a memsahib might be something of inconceivable terror—her petticoats
looked like it. Therefore the pony withdrew himself into a remote corner
of his stable, where he stood looking ineffably silly, and declined to
be seduced by split pieces of sugar-cane or wheedling words.

“_Gorah atcha hai?_”[45] asked Helen, and was assured that he was very
“atcha,” that his grain he ate, his grass he ate, his water he ate, and
“_cubbi kooch na bolta_——” “he never said anything whatever,” which was
the final proof of his flourishing condition.

Footnote 45:

  Is the horse well?

It was getting a little discouraging, but Helen thought that before
retreating she might at least inspect the bearer’s cow, a cow being a
gentle domestic animal, of uniform habits, all the world over. One’s own
cow is a thorn in the flesh and a source of ruin, in India. She declines
to give milk, except to the outside world at so much a seer,[46] she
devours abnormal quantities of food, she is neglected and becomes
depraved, being nobody’s particular business. But it is impossible to
draw lacteal supplies from an unknown source in India. It is paying a
large price for cholera bacilli, which is absurd, since one can get them
almost anywhere for nothing. To say nothing of the depravity of the
milk-wallah,[47] who strains his commodity through his dhoty, and
replenishes his cans from the first stagnant tank he comes to. The wise
and advisable thing is to permit the bearer, as a gracious favour, to
keep a cow on the premises and to supply the family at current rates. It
is a source of income to him, and of confidence to you, while the cow
does her whole duty in that clean and comfortable state whereto she is
called. The bearer, too, is honoured and dignified by the possession of
the sacred animal. He performs every office for her himself, though he
would scorn to bring a pail of water to a horse, and he is happy to live
in the odour of her sanctity. Helen discovered the cow of their
establishment tied with her calf outside the best “go-down” in the
compound—the largest and cleanest—which she occupied at night. The
bearer himself had not nearly such good quarters, and this was of his
own dispensation. She wore a string of blue beads around her horns, and
munched contentedly at a large illegal breakfast of straw which had been
bought and paid for to supply the pony’s bed.

Footnote 46:

  Two pounds.

Footnote 47:

  Man.

“Poor cooey!” said Helen, advancing to attempt a familiarity, but the
cow put down her head and made such a violent lunge at her that she beat
a hasty and undignified retreat. This was partly on account of the calf,
which stood a little way off, but well within the maternal vision, and
it was quite an unreasonable demonstration, as the calf was stuffed, and
put there to act upon the cow’s imagination only. This is a necessary
expedient to ensure milk in India from a cow that has no calf of her
own; it is a painful imposition, but uniformly successful. The fact is
one of reputation, as being the only one invariably rejected by
travellers as a lively lie, whereas they are known to swallow greedily
much larger fictions than stuffed calves.

From an upper window, shortly after, Helen saw the cow’s morning toilet
being performed by the bearer. And it was an instructive sight to see
this solemn functionary holding at arm’s length the utmost end of her
tail, and with art and precision improving its appearance.

In the cool of the evening after dinner, the two Brownes sat together in
the shadow of the pillars of their upper veranda, and Helen told the
story of her adventure in the compound. Overhead the pigeons cooed of
their day’s doings, the pony neighed from his stable in the expectation
of his content. A light wind stirred the palms where they stood against
the stars, the smoke of the mallie’s pipal leaves curled up faintly from
his roof where he dwelt beside the gate. Below, in the black shadow of
the godowns, easeful figures sat or moved, the subdued tones of their
parley hardly came to the upper veranda. They had rice and rest and the
comfortable hubble-bubble. And the sahib and the memsahib devised how
they might circumvent these humble people in all their unlawful doings,
till the air grew chill with the dew, and the young moon showed over
their neighbour’s tamarind tree.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER IX.


MRS. BROWNE’S ayah was a little Mussulman woman of about thirty-five,
with bright eyes and an expression of great worldly wisdom upon her
small, square, high-boned face. She dressed somewhat variously, but her
official garments were a short jacket and a striped cotton petticoat, a
string of beads round her neck, silver bangles on her arms and ankles,
hoops in her ears, and a small gold button in her right nostril. This
last bit of coquetry affected Helen uncomfortably for some time. Her
name was Chua, signifying “a rat,” and her heathen sponsors showed
rather a fine discrimination in giving it to her. She was very like one.
It would be easy to fancy her nibbling in the dark, or making
unwarrantable investigations when honest people were asleep. When Chua
was engaged and questioned upon the subject of remuneration, she
salaamed very humbly, and said, “What the memsahib pleases,” which was
ten rupees. At this Chua’s countenance fell, for most of the ayahs of
her acquaintance received twelve. Accepting the fact, however, that her
mistress was not a “burra memsahib”[48] from whom much might be
expected, but a “chota memsahib”[49] from whom little could be
extracted, she went away content, and spread her mat in the women’s
place in the mosque and bowed many times to the west as the sun went
down, and paid at least four annas to the _moulvi_[50] who had helped
her to this good fortune.

Footnote 48:

  Great memsahib.

Footnote 49:

  Little memsahib.

Footnote 50:

  Priest.

Chua abode in her own house, as is the custom of ayahs with family ties.
She was married—her husband was a kitmutgar. They lived in a bustee in
the very middle of Calcutta, where dwelt several other kitmutgars and
their wives, a dhoby and a number of goats, and Chua walked out every
morning to her work. Then home at twelve to cook her food and sleep,
then back at four for further duty until after dinner. She never
breakfasted before starting in the morning, but she carried with her
always a small square tin box from which she refreshed herself
surreptitiously at intervals. Inside the box was only a rolled-up betel
leaf, and inside the leaf a dab of white paste; but it was to Chua what
the hubble-bubble was to Abdul, her husband, a great and comfortable
source of meditation upon the goodness of Allah, and the easiest form of
extortion to be practised upon her lawful taskmistress.

[Illustration: CHUA.]

Helen found great difficulty at first in assimilating this hand-maid
into her daily life. She had been told that an ayah was indispensable,
and she could accept Chua as a necessary appendage to the lofty state of
her Oriental existence, but to find occupation for her became rather a
burden to the mind of Mrs. Browne. Things to do were precious, she could
not spare them to be done by anybody else, even at ten rupees a month
with the alternative of improper idleness. Moreover, the situation was
in some respects embarrassing. One could have one’s ribbons straightened
and one’s hair brushed with equanimity, but when it came to the bathing
of one’s feet and the putting on of one’s stockings Helen was disposed
to dispense with the services of her ayah as verging on the indelicate.
Chua was still more grieved when her mistress utterly declined to allow
herself to be “punched and prodded,” as she expressed it, in the process
of gentle massaging in which the ayah species are proficient. Mrs.
Browne was young then, and a new-comer, and not of a disposition to
brook any interference with her muscular tissues. But the other day she
particularly recommended an ayah to me on account of this
accomplishment. This to illustrate, of course, not the degeneration of
Mrs. Browne’s sense of propriety, but of her muscular tissues.

The comprehension and precise knowledge which Chua at once obtained of
her mistress’s wardrobe and effects was wonderful in its way. She knew
the exact contents of every box and drawer and wardrobe, the number of
pen-nibs in the writing-case, the number of spools in the work-basket.
Helen used to feel, in the shock of some disclosure of observation
extraordinary, as if the omniscient little woman had made an index of
her mistress’s emotions and ideas as well, and could lay her small
skinny brown finger upon any one of them, which intuition was very far
from being wrong. Chua early induced an admiring confidence in her
rectitude by begging Mrs. Browne to make a list of all her possessions
so that from time to time she could demonstrate their safety. The ayah
felt herself responsible. She knew that upon the provocation of a
missing embroidered petticoat there might be unpleasant results
connected with the police-wallah and the _thana_,[51] not only for her
but for the whole establishment, and she wished to be in a secure
position to give evidence, if necessary, against somebody else. It could
certainly not be Chua, therefore, Helen announced, when she communicated
to her lord at the breakfast table the fact that her very best scissors
had been missing for three days. “Isn’t it tedious?” said she.

Footnote 51:

  Police office.

“Scissors,” said young Browne. “Yes, good new shiny sharp ones, weren’t
they, with Rodgers’ name plainly stamped on them—and rather small?”

“All that,” lamented Helen, “and embroidery size—such loves!”

[Illustration: AN ACCIDENT DISCLOSED THEM AT THE BOTTOM OF AN IMPOSSIBLE
VASE.]

“You are gradually coming within the operation of custom, my dear. Steel
is the weakness of the Aryan. He—in this case she—will respect your
clothes, take care of your money, and guard your jewellery—they all have
a general sense of property in its correct relation, but it does not
apply to a small pair of scissors or a neat pocket knife. Such things
seem to yield to some superior attraction outside the moral sense
connected with these people, and they invariably disappear. It’s
inveterate, but it’s a nuisance. One has to make such a row.”

“George,” said Helen gravely, “why do you say in this case _she_?”

“I think you’ll find it was your virtuous maid, my dear. It wasn’t the
bearer—he has permitted me to keep the same knife and nail scissors now
for two years and a half, and the rest of the servants, all but the
ayah, are the bearer’s creatures, and will reflect exactly his morality
in quality and degree. She isn’t—she’s an irresponsible functionary,
except to you; you’ll have to keep an eye on her. However, if we make
ourselves patiently and unremittingly disagreeable for a week or two
they’ll turn up.”

“I haven’t the Hindustani to be disagreeable in,” Helen remarked.

“Oh, you needn’t be violent; just inquire at least three times a day,
‘_Hamara kinchi, kidder gia?_’[52] and look forbidding the rest of the
time. Never dream for a moment they’re stolen or admit they’re lost.
It’s a kind of worry she won’t be able to stand—she’ll never know what
you’re going to do. And she’ll conclude it’s cheaper in the end to
restore them.”

Footnote 52:

  My scissors, where have they gone?

I don’t know whether the Brownes made themselves as disagreeable as they
might about the kinchi, but it was a long time before they were
restored. Then an accident disclosed them at the bottom of an impossible
vase. Chua, standing by, went through an extravaganza of gratification.
Her eyes shone, she laughed and clasped her hands with dramatic effect.
“_Eggi bat_”[53]—would the memsahib inform the sahib and also the bearer
that they had been found?—the latter evidently having resorted lately to
some nefarious means of extracting from her what she had done with them.
Chua had doubtless had an uncomfortable quarter of an hour before her
mistress discovered them, and felt unjustly served in it. For the theft
was only a prospective one, to be accomplished in the course of time, if
it looked advisable. It did not look advisable and Chua reconsidered it,
thereby leaving her Mohammedan conscience void of offence.

Footnote 53:

  One word.

As soon as she was able to understand and be understood, Helen thought
it her duty to make some kindly enquiries about Chua’s domestic affairs.
Had she, for instance, any children?

“_Na, memsahib!_” she responded, with a look of assumed contempt that
could not have sat more emphatically upon the face of any _fin de
siècle_ lady who does not believe in babies. “_Baba hai na! Baba na
muncta_,”[54] she went on with a large curl of the lip, “Baba all time
_cry kurta_[55]—Waow! Waow! _atcha na_,[56] memsahib!”

Footnote 54:

  I do not want babies.

Footnote 55:

  Makes crying.

Footnote 56:

  Not good.

“Oh na, ayah! Baba atcha hai,” laughed Helen, defending the sacredest
theory of her sex.

Chua took an attitude of self-effacement, but her reply had a
patronising dignity, “_Memsahib kawasti baba atcha hai_,” said she.
“_Memsahib kawasti kooch kam hai na! Ayah ka kam hai! Tub baba atcha
na—kooch na muncta!_”[57]

Footnote 57:

  For the memsahib babies are good. The memsahib has no work to do. The
  ayah has work. Then babies are not good, she does not want any!

Chua occupied quite the modern ground, which was exhilarating in an
Oriental, and doubtless testified to the march of truth—that babies were
only practicable and advisable when their possible mothers could find
nothing better to do. Helen was impressed, and more deeply so when she
presently discovered that Chua and Abdul, her husband, lived in
different houses in the bustee I have mentioned—different huts, that is,
mud-baked and red-tiled and leaking, and offering equal facilities for
the intrusion of the ubiquitous goat. Chua spoke of Abdul with an angry
flash of contempt. In accommodating himself to circumstances recently,
Abdul had offended her very deeply. It was on an occasion when Chua had
accompanied a memsahib to England with the usual infant charge. She was
very sick, she earned a hundred and fifty rupees, she was away three
months—“_kali tin mahina_,[58] memsahib!” and when she returned she
found Abdul mated to another. She was artful, was Chua—her mistress’s
face expressed such a degree of disapprobation that she fancied herself
implicated, and instantly laughed to throw a triviality over Abdul’s
misconduct. It was a girl he married, a mere child “_baba kamafik_,[59]
memsahib”—fourteen years old. But her scorn came through the mask of her
amusement when she went on to state that the house of Abdul was no
longer without its olive branch, but that Abdul’s sahib had gone away
and there was very little rice for anybody in that family. The recreant
had come to her in his extremity, asking alms, she said with her curled
lip. “_Rupia do-o!_”[60] she whined, holding out her hand and imitating
his suppliance with intensest irony. Then drawing herself up proudly she
rehearsed her answer brief, contemptuous, and to the point.

Footnote 58:

   Only three months.

Footnote 59:

  Like a baby.

Footnote 60:

  Ten rupees.

“_Daga na!—Jao!_”[61]

Footnote 61:

  I will not give! Go!

She had invested the proceeds of her journey over the “black water” in a
ticca-gharry which lent itself all day long to the Calcutta public under
her administration and to her profit. The day after Helen had been thus
edified, the ayah did not appear until the afternoon. She had been to
law about some point in relation to the ticca-gharry. I can’t remember
what Mrs. Browne said it was—but she wanted an advance of wages for her
legal expenses. She intended to spare nothing to be triumphant—her
adversary had trusted his case to a common _vakeel_,[62] she would have
a _gorah-vakeel_,[63] though they came higher. Her witnesses would be
properly paid too—a rupee apiece, and eight annas extra for any
necessary falsification at present unexpected. The next afternoon she
came late, with a tale of undeserved disaster which she lucubrated with
indignant tears, after the manner of her sex. It was not that the
magistrate sahib was not fair, he was just as the sun at noon, or that
Rahim the gharry-wallah had more witnesses than she—indeed, being a poor
man, he had only four—but they were four of the five, unhappily, whose
services _she_ had engaged. The gharry-wallah had offered them two
rupees—a higher bid—and so they spoke _jute bat_.[64] But he would never
be able to pay! Oh, it was very _carab_![65] and Chua sat in the dust
and wrapped her face in her _sari_[66] and wept again. Later, she
informed her mistress that it was possible she might again be absent
to-morrow—it was possible that she might come into contact that evening
in the street with these defaulting witnesses—violent contact. _It was
possible_ that if they laughed at her she would strike them, and
then—with an intensely observing eye always upon Helen—then her
memsahib, in the event of her being carried off to the _thana_ for
assault, would of course enquire “_Hamara ayah, kidder hai?_”[67] and
immediately take proceedings to get her out. Chua’s countenance fell,
though with instant submission, when Helen informed her sternly that she
would on no account institute such proceedings, and she was deprived
even of illegal means of satisfaction, taken with impunity.

Footnote 62:

   Lawyer.

Footnote 63:

   Literally, horse-lawyer.

Footnote 64:

  False talk.

Footnote 65:

  Bad.

Footnote 66:

  Head cloth.

Footnote 67:

   My ayah, where is she?

It was Chua’s aptitude for assault that led to her final expulsion from
the service of the Brownes and from the pages of these annals. Her
manner toward the bearer had been propitiatory from the beginning. She
called him “Sirdar,”[68] she paid him florid Oriental compliments; by
the effacement of her own status and personality she tried to establish
a friendly understanding with him. She undertook small services on his
behalf. She attempted to owe him allegiance as the other servants did.
It is impossible to say that she did not press upon him a percentage of
her _tulub_, to ensure his omnipotent good-will. But Kasi was for some
dark reason unreciprocal—young Browne believed he thought she was
storming his affections—and at best consented only to preserve an armed
neutrality. Whereat Chua became resentful and angry, carried her head
high, and exchanged remarks with Kasi which were not in the nature of
amenities. The crisis came one afternoon when the Brownes were out.

Footnote 68:

   Head bearer.

“I have something to tell you after dinner,” said Mrs. Browne
significantly later, across the joint.

“And I have something to tell _you_,” young Browne responded with equal
meaning.

Mrs. Browne had the first word, in order, her husband said, that she
shouldn’t have the last. She explained that she had found the ayah in
tears, quite extinguished upon the floor, the cause being insult. Chua
had forgotten at noon the little bright shawl which she wrapped about
her head in the streets—had left it upon the memsahib’s veranda. Seeing
it, the bearer had done a deadly thing. He had not touched it himself,
but he had sent for the sweeper—the sweeper!—and bade him _fenk-do_[69]
it to his own unclean place of living. And there, after much search, had
Chua found it. Therefore was she deeply abased, and therefore did she
tender her resignation. The bearer had behaved _Rajah kamafik!_[70] and
had, moreover, spoken to her in _bat_ that was _carab_, very _carab_.

Footnote 69:

  Throw.

Footnote 70:

  Like a lord!

“Yes,” said the sahib, judicially, “and the bearer came to me also
weeping with joined hands to supplicate. His tale of woe is a little
different. He declares he never saw the shawl and never gave the
order—I’ve no doubt he did both—but that the sweeper acted upon his own
responsibility. And what do you think the ayah did in revenge? She
_slippered_ him!—all round the compound! The bearer, poor chap, fled in
disorder, but couldn’t escape. He has undoubtedly been slippered. And in
the presence of the whole compound! It’s worse—infinitely worse—than
having his _puggri_[71] knocked off in ribaldry. And now he says that
though he has served me faithfully all these years, and I am his father
and his mother, his honour has been damaged in this place, and he prays
to be allowed to depart.”

Footnote 71:

  Turban.

“Slippered him, George! but he’s such a big man and she such a little
woman! All round the compound! Oh,” said George’s wife, giving way to
unseemly hilarity, “I should like to have seen that!”

“Little termagant! Oh, it was the insult he ran from, my dear—not the
blow. That she—an ayah and the wife of a kitmutgar, should have touched
him with the sole of her shoe! Don’t laugh, dear—they’ll hear you, and
I’d rather they didn’t.”

The Brownes held further debate, and took all the circumstances into
consideration. Young Browne had evidently arrived immediately at a
judicial view of the case, though he professed himself willing to let
the bearer go if Helen wanted to retain Chua. “Though in that case
there’ll be anarchy, my dear, I warn you,” said he. The result was a
solemn gathering of the servants next morning upon the veranda,
addressed by young Browne, while the memsahib sat up straight in another
chair and looked serious. He took no evidence, there would have been too
much, but he spoke thus:

“There was yesterday a great disturbance in the compound, which is a
shameful thing. Those who thus made great noises, and used bad language
and were without self-respect, were the bearer and the ayah. The bearer
has served me many years in many places and with many other servants,
and I have never before known him to act without shame or to quarrel.
The ayah has been known a few weeks only. Both the bearer and the ayah
wish to go away. The ayah may go. _Bus!_”[72]

Footnote 72:

  Enough.

After this simple and direct delivery no word was said. The servants
dispersed to the compound, the bearer, reinstated in his self-esteem and
justified before the world, applied himself to forget his wrongs and was
more diligent than ever in his master’s service. Chua stated to her
mistress that if she had any more trouble she would die and the wind
would blow through her bones, and many other things in grief-stricken
Hindustani which Helen did not understand. But her mistress permitted
her this balm to her wounded feelings, that when she departed she left
the dishonoured shawl scornfully behind her, having privately received
sufficient backsheesh to buy three like it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               CHAPTER X.


CALCUTTA, in social matters, is a law unto herself, inscrutable,
unevadable. She asks no opinion and permits no suggestion. She proclaims
that it shall be thus, thus it is, and however odd and inconvenient the
custom may be, it lies within the province of no woman—the men need not
be thought of—to change it, or even to discover by what historic whim it
came to be. Calcutta decrees, for example, that from twelve to two, what
time the sun strikes straightest and strongest on the carriage-top, what
time all brown Bengal with sweet reasonableness takes its siesta, in the
very heat and burden of the day—from twelve to two is the proper hour
forsooth for the memsahib to visit and be visited. Thus this usually
tepid form frequently reaches a boiling point of social consideration,
becomes a mark of recognition which is simply perfervid. It is also an
unamiable time of day. The cheering effects of breakfast have worn off,
and tiffin looms distantly, the reward of virtue. It would be impossible
to say for how much malice it is directly responsible. But this is of
the gods; we stew obediently, we do not dream of demurring. Another
honoured principle is that all strangers, except brides, shall make the
first call. Herein is the indolence of Calcutta generous and
unreckoning. All new-comers, of whatever business, jat, or antecedents,
have the fee simple of her drawing-rooms, the right to expect their
calls to be returned, and even to feel slighted if no further
recognition is made of them. Anybody may tacitly request Calcutta to
invite him to dinner, and lay upon Calcutta the disagreeable onus of
refusing to do it. Strangers present themselves on their merits; the
tone of society naturally therefore becomes a little assertive. There
are other methods of indirect compulsion. A man may call—this invariably
at mid-day on Sunday—and thereby invite you to leave cards upon his
wife, and the lady is aggrieved if you decline the invitation. Calcutta
suffers all this. It is the _dustur_.

Mrs. George William Browne of course was a bride, and had made her
appearance at church. It was not an imposing appearance, and probably
did not attract as much attention as the Brownes imagined; they occupied
one of the back seats of a sacred edifice of Calcutta which is known to
be consecrated to official circles, and the Brownes were only
mercantile. But the appearance had been made, whether or not anybody was
aware of it; and Mrs. Browne was assuredly entitled to sit from twelve
to two in the days that followed at the receipt of congratulations.

“All Calcutta won’t come,” remarked young Browne, in a tone of easy
prophecy. “But Mrs. Fisher will probably look you up, and Mrs. Jack
Lovitt, and the Wodenhamers—I’ve known the Wodenhamers a long time. And
Mrs. P. Macintyre”—the person who undertakes this history—“Mrs. P. is
the only lady in the firm just now. She’s sure to call.”

“Where are the rest, George?”

“One of ’em dead. Mrs. J. L. Macintyre’s dead—two of ’em, Mrs. Babcock
and Mrs. Walsh, home in England with their babies.”

“But, George—all the people who came to the wedding?”

“Out of compliment to the Macdonalds. Yes, they’ll probably call—in
their own good time. They’re very busy making other visits just now, my
dear. We mustn’t allow ourselves to forget that we’re popularly known to
be living on five hundred a month. Society bows to five hundred a
month—with possibilities of advance—but it doesn’t hurry about calling.
You see there are so many people with superior claims—fifteen hundred,
three thousand a month. It’s an original place in that respect—Calcutta.
The valuation of society is done by Government. Most people arrive here
invoiced at so much, the amount usually rises as they stay, but they’re
always kept carefully ticketed and published, and Calcutta accepts or
rejects them, religiously and gratefully, at their market rates. It’s
rather an uninteresting social basis—especially from our point of
view—but it has the advantage of simplicity. You have a solemn official
right to expect exactly what you can pay for.”

With which treble cynicism young Browne received a bit of mignonette in
his button-hole, kissed his wife, and departed. They were not really
much concerned, these Brownes, about the conduct and theories of their
fellow-beings at this time. Society was homogeneous, a human mass whose
business it was to inhabit other parts of Calcutta, and do it as
unobtrusively as possible. Even as a subject for conversation, society
was perfunctory, and rather dull. It was a thing apart, it did not
menace them yet, or involve them, or tempt them. They had not arrived at
a point when anything it chose to concern itself with was important to
them. It is charming, this indifference, while it lasts, but it is not
intended to endure.

“It is certainly pretty,” Helen remarked in a tone of conviction,
looking round her little drawing-room. “It’s charming!” And it was. The
walls were tinted a delicate grey, and the windows were all hung with
Indian saris, pale yellow and white. The fresh matted floor was bespread
in places with blue and white dhurries, and a big beflowered Japanese
vase in a corner held a spiky palm. There were books and
pictures—perhaps neither of the sort to bear the last analysis, but that
at a glance didn’t matter—and bits of old china, and all Aunt Plovtree’s
crewel work, and two or three vases running over with roses. There were
some comfortable wicker chairs from the China bazar, gay with cushions
after Liberty, and there were all the little daintinesses that accompany
the earlier stages of matrimony. Through the windows came in bars and
patches the sunlight of high noon, and the rustling of the palms, and
the cooing of the doves in the veranda.

“It hasn’t much _character_,” said Mrs. Browne, with her head at a
critical angle, “but it’s charming.”

The fact is that it expressed cleanliness and the Brownes’ income. I
fear that Mrs. Browne belonged to that very numerous class of ladies in
whose opinion character is a thing to arrange, just a matter to be
attended to like the ordering of dinner. If you had asked her what
particular character she wanted her room to express I think she would
have been nonplussed. Or she might have said, Oh, she wanted it to be
“artistic,” with a little smile of defiance which would have been an
evasion, not to say an equivocation of the matter. Helen Browne was not
“artistic,” and why she should have wanted her drawing-room to express
what she did not understand is one of those enigmas common to the sex,
as it flowers from day to day into new modern perplexities.

Perhaps it was much more charming of her to be what she was. It led her,
at all events, into no burlesques. Nothing could be less extravagant,
for instance, than that she should presently occupy herself, with amused
concern and mock despair, in turning over a collection of young Browne’s
garments with a view to improving them. The bearer brought them to her
in a basket, laid them deprecatingly at her feet, and retired, doubtless
thinking that though the memsahib might be troublesome in various ways,
she had her advantages. She would perhaps destroy the sahib’s partiality
for old clothes. He himself had struggled with these ancient socks and
shirts a long and fruitless time, had cobbled them until his soul
revolted, especially when the sahib, observing the result of his labour,
had laughed deep laughs. The sahib was in no wise stingy—he would give
new harness to the pony and new _kupra_[73] to the syce, and the bazar
was full of beautiful garments for the apparelling of sahibs, yet
persistently and without sense of dishonour he enrobed himself daily
thus! It was a painful, incomprehensible eccentricity. Now, perhaps,
there would be a new order of things, and a chance for a little
reasonable _dusturi_.[74] And Kasi spent the rest of the morning
discussing contracts in the bazar.

Footnote 73:

  Clothes.

Footnote 74:

  Profit.

To his wife, however, young Browne was obliged to be explanatory, and
even apologetic, upon this point. He had to tell her it was a way they
had in India of sticking to their old things—it was only the most
hideous swells that ever got anything new. You couldn’t keep up with the
fashion in India anyhow—the thing was to be superior to it altogether.
Oh, she wouldn’t have him discard that hat; he’d had that hat four
years, and he was attached to it. If he might be allowed to keep it
another year or two the shape would very likely “come in” again. Surely
he wasn’t inexorably condemned to a new coat. It would take years to
make another as comfortable as that, and it was only a bit ragged in the
cuffs. But Helen was inflexible over the shortcomings of her husband’s
wardrobe, as it is the first duty of the ladies of Anglo-India to be,
and young Browne shortly paid one penalty of matrimony in being reclad
at vast expense, and suffered much contumely in consequence from his
bachelor contemporaries. This morning Helen smiled over her basket with
content and entertainment.

“What aren’t shreds are patches,” said she to the pigeons. “Dear me!
Fancy having married a person who hasn’t been properly mended since he
left England.” The pigeons replied with suitable sympathy. There was a
roll of wheels under the porch, and the bearer brought up cards, “Mr.
and Mrs. John Lawrence Lovitt.”

“Bearer,” said Helen, mistress of the situation, “all these things
_lejao_![75] Memsahib _salaam do_.”[76]

Footnote 75:

  Take away.

Footnote 76:

  Give greeting.

“_Bahut atcha_,”[77] said the bearer, whisking them away as he went. Not
for worlds would Kasi have allowed his master’s dilapidations to become
public. And Mrs. Jack Lovitt tripped up.

Footnote 77:

  Very good.

“How d’ye do, Mrs. Browne?” she said. “I hope I haven’t come too soon.
Some one told me you’d been seen—somewhere—church, I suppose. People
always do go to church at first, in Calcutta. After a while you won’t—at
least not so regularly. It gets to be rather a bore, don’t you know,
either morning or evening. In the morning it takes it out of you so that
you haven’t energy to receive your callers, and in the evening—well, if
you go in for Sunday tennis you’re too much done for church. But perhaps
you won’t go in for Sunday tennis.”

Mrs. Lovitt sank into a chair and crossed her knees so that one small
high-heeled boot stuck out at a sharp and knowing angle. She was a very
little person, and she wore a very smart gown, though it was only a
spotted cotton, and a very small bonnet. Her long-handled parasol had an
enormous bow on it, and her small hands were buttoned up in an excessive
amount of kid. She had a tiny waist, and her dress fitted her with an
absurd perfection. There was a slight extravagance about Mrs. Jack
Lovitt everywhere. No one could describe her without saying “very” and
“exceedingly” a great many times. Her thin little face hadn’t a shade of
colour—it was absolutely pale, and there were odd little drawn lines
about it that did not interfere with its particular kind of
attractiveness. She wore a _pince nez_ astride her small, sharp
features, and when she sat down it dropped into her lap quite as if it
belonged to a man of fashion.

Helen said, with a conscious effort not to be priggish, that she didn’t
think she would go in for Sunday tennis.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Lovitt, smiling tolerantly, “don’t believe in it, I
suppose? Neither did I when I came out. You’ll soon get over that.
You’ll begin virtuously by doing it for your husband’s sake, and by and
by you’ll find that kind of prejudice doesn’t thrive in India. I played
with your husband the last Sunday before you came out. The other side
completely smashed us up; I don’t think your husband was in his usual
form.”

“Oh, I dare say he was,” said Helen, smiling; “he doesn’t play a very
strong game.”

“Oh, I wasn’t either. I played abominably. But, of course, I blamed it
all upon him; I declared his nerves were affected—on account of you, you
know. He _admitted_ there might be something in it,” and Mrs. Lovitt
laughed casually. “He says you’re a tremendous swell at it,” she
continued inquiringly.

Helen protested, and Mrs. Lovitt went on to say that it didn’t matter
much how one played anyway, for tennis was certainly going out—everybody
went in for golf now—links all over the place. Did Helen go in for golf,
and had she done any cricket before she left England? Mrs. Lovitt had a
cousin, Stella Short, who was in the Wilbarrow Eleven. Perhaps Helen had
seen her photograph—it had been in all the ladies’ papers.

“What do you think of the climate, Mrs. Browne?”

Helen said she thought it perfectly delightful; she found the glare a
little trying.

“Oh, _glare_! Wait till the hot weather comes. It’s all very well now
and will be till March, but the hot weather’s simply beastly; and in the
rains—well, in the rains you feel exactly like a dead rat.”

“That must be an extraordinary feeling,” Helen responded, with some
astonishment at the directness of the lady’s similes.

“It _is_—rather! I suppose you’re going to see the Viceroy’s Cup won
this afternoon?”

“Yes,” said Helen, “are you?”

“Very much so! I’m one of those happy people who have got a tip. Jimmy
Forbes gave me mine. You don’t know Jimmy. He and I are great
chums—we’re always out together.” Mrs. Lovitt spoke with virtuous
candour. “He’s an awfully _pucca_[78] sort of fellow, is Jimmy—you’ll
like him when you know him. He’s a great friend of my husband’s, too,”
Mrs. Lovitt added. “Jack thinks a lot of him. And he’s very knowing
about horses. How do you get on with the servants? They’ll stick you no
end at first—of course you know that. When I began I used to pay three
rupees for a leg of mutton. It used to cost us two hundred a month more
than our income to live!”

Footnote 78:

  Genuine.

“Dear me!” said Helen. “Wasn’t that very inconvenient?”

“Inconvenient as the—as possible, sometimes, till Jack got his
promotion. Now we manage all right.”

“Have you any children, Mrs. Lovitt?” Helen ventured, as the bearer
brought up another card.

“Children! Bless me, no, I should think not!” replied Mrs. John Lawrence
Lovitt. “But I’ve got the littlest black and tan in Calcutta. Jimmy
Forbes gave him to me. You must come and see him. Hello, Kitty Toote, so
you’re on the rampage! Good-bye, Mrs. Browne; don’t let her prejudice
you against Calcutta. She’s always running it down, and it’s the
sweetest place in the world!”

Mrs. Toote made polite greetings to Mrs. Browne. “You know it isn’t
really,” she said, disposing her tall figure gracefully among the cotton
cushions of Helen’s little sofa. “But of course it depends upon your
tastes.” Mrs. Toote had fine eyes, and an inclination to _embonpoint_.
Her expression advertised a superior discontent, but there was a more
genuine suggestion of gratified well-being underneath which contradicted
the advertisement. “It’s really awfully frivolous here,” Mrs. Toote
remarked. “Don’t you think so—after England?”

“How can I possibly tell—so soon?” said Helen.

“No, I suppose not. Personally, I wouldn’t mind the _frivolity_. The
frivolity’s all right—if there were only anything _else_, but there
isn’t.”

“Anything else?” Helen inquired.

“Yes, anything really elevating, you know—anything that one could devote
one’s self to. I haven’t a word to say against frivolity; I like it
myself as well as anybody,” said Mrs. Toote with engaging _naïveté_,
“but there ought to be something behind it to back it up, you know.”
Mrs. Toote spoke as if she were objecting to dining exclusively upon
ortolans. But the objection was a matter of pure dietetic theory. In
practice, Mrs. Toote throve upon ortolans.

“Nobody reads,” said Mrs. Toote.

“Nobody?” asked Helen.

“Nobody that _I_ know—except novels, of course.”

“And you prefer other kinds of books,” Helen said, impressed. “More
solid reading?”

“Oh, I enjoy a good novel,” Mrs. Toote conceded; “but I don’t think
people ought to confine themselves to fiction. There’s biography and
philosophy, and—and social economy. All very interesting—to me.”

“Which are your favorite authors?” asked Helen, with deference.

Mrs. Toote thought a minute. “John Stuart Mill,” said she, “is a very
fine writer. My husband has all his books. So is Herbert Spencer; we
have all his, too. So is Sir Henry Cunninghame. _Have_ you read _The
Chronicles of Dustypore_?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Helen. “Is it very good?”

“Oh, awfully. You _must_ read it. Then, of course, there’s Kipling. I’m
devoted to Kipling.”

“Do you think he’s nice?” asked Mrs. Browne, doubtfully.

“I think he’s everything. And I must say for the people here they do
read their Kipling. But they don’t talk about him. I don’t believe they
know the difference between Kipling and anybody else.”

“Perhaps,” Helen ventured, “they’re tired of him.”

“That’s just where it is. How could anybody get tired of Kipling! You’ll
find plenty of gaiety in Calcutta, Mrs. Browne; but you won’t find
much—culture!” And Mrs. Toote lifted her eyebrows and twisted her lips
into a look of critical resignation.

“Aren’t there any societies?”

“Oh, if you mean the Asiatic, that’s for scientists and people of that
sort, you know, and they read awful papers there about monoliths and
ancient dynasties and things. You can’t consider that the Asiatic
represents any popular tendency. _I_ don’t know anybody that’s fond of
Sanskrit. Of course,” Mrs. Toote continued, “I’m speaking generally, and
I mean particularly the women out here. There are some clever men in the
departments, naturally. One or two of them are my greatest friends, and
it _is_ refreshing to talk to them.”

“But are the ladies _all_ frivolous?” Helen asked.

“Oh, dear, no!”

“And the unfrivolous ones—what do they do?”

“They mess about charities, and keep their husbands in their pockets,
and write eternal letters to their children in England. I’ve less
patience with them than with the other kind,” Mrs. Toote avowed.

“Well,” said Helen, smiling, “I’m not very literary, so I daresay it
won’t matter much to me.”

“Then you’ll either go in for society or philanthropy—that’s the way
everybody ends up. You are going to the Drawing-Room next Thursday?”

“I think so.”

“Well, immediately after you must write your names down in the
Government House books. Then they ask you to everything, you see. Don’t
put it off,” advised Mrs. Toote, on the point of departure. “Don’t put
it off _a day_.”

In a quarter of an hour the Wodenhamers came—Colonel and Mrs.
Wodenhamer, a large lady and a generously planned gentleman. The
smallest and slightest of Helen’s wicker chairs creaked ominously, as
Colonel Wodenhamer sat down in it with an air of asserting that he
wasn’t the weight you might think him. As to Mrs. Wodenhamer, her
draperies completely submerged Helen’s cotton cushions upon the sofa.
Colonel Wodenhamer had mutton-chop whiskers and a double chin and a look
of rotund respectability that couldn’t be surpassed in Hyde Park on
Sunday. He was not a fighting colonel, and in the adding up of
commissariat accounts there is time and opportunity to develop these
amplitudes. Mrs. Wodenhamer matched him more perfectly than is customary
in the odd luck of matrimony, and had a complexion besides, which the
Colonel couldn’t boast. The complexion spread over features generously
planned, and a smile that contained many of the qualities of a warm
sunset, spread over both. Helen wondered in vain to which of Mrs.
Toote’s two social orders they belonged, for as soon as Colonel
Wodenhamer had explained how it was he had come to call on a
week-day—Colonel Wodenhamer made this a point of serious importance—Mrs.
Wodenhamer led the conversation into domestic details. It wandered for a
time among pots and pans—enamelled ones were so much the best—it
embraced all the servants, took a turn in the direction of the bazar,
and finally settled upon _jharruns_.

“You’ll find them _so_ troublesome!” said Mrs. Wodenhamer.

“I don’t know what they are,” said Mrs. Browne, reflecting upon the
insect pests of India.

“Don’t you, really! It’s a wonder you haven’t found out! They’re towels
or dust-cloths—anything of that sort. Almost every servant must have his
_jharruns_. You have no idea how they mount up.”

“I suppose they must,” returned Helen, and turned to Colonel Wodenhamer
with intent to venture something about the weather.

“I don’t see how you’ve got on without them so long!” Mrs. Wodenhamer
remarked, glancing round with involuntary criticism. “I assure you I
give out weekly in my house no less than five dozen—five _dozen_!”

“That’s a great many,” Helen agreed. “A very fair passage, I believe,
Colonel Wodenhamer—thirty-one days.”

“It’s just a question whether they’re better made in the house,” Mrs.
Wodenhamer went on placidly; “I don’t know that I wouldn’t advise you to
go to the Women’s Friendly—they work very neatly there.”

“For the _jharruns_. Oh, yes!” said Helen. “The captain’s name? I’m
_afraid_ I forget, Colonel Wodenhamer. He was a little man.”

“They wear out so frightfully fast,” his lady remarked.

“P. and O. captains? But consider the life, my dear!”

“_Jharruns_, John! Mrs. Browne really shouldn’t begin with less than six
dozen.”

“I must see about them at once,” Helen said. “I’m sure they are very
important.”

“The whole comfort of your life depends upon them,” her visitor replied,
rather ambiguously, and at that moment Mrs. Macdonald came up, and the
conversation became so general that nobody noticed Mrs. Wodenhamer’s
being lost in thought. As she and her husband rose to go, “Your house is
smaller than mine,” said Mrs. Wodenhamer, “I forgot that. I think
“—conscientiously—” you _might_ do with four dozen.”

Neither could Helen bring Mrs. Macdonald under Mrs. Toote’s
classification, for Mrs. Macdonald certainly did not give one the idea
of a serious person, and yet she talked a great deal about committees.
Mrs. Macdonald expressly advised Helen to “go in for” philanthropy, and
in the next breath declared that of course she and young Browne must get
themselves put up at the Saturday Club, where a proportion of Calcutta
banded itself together for purposes of dancing and amateur theatricals,
tennis and light literature. It was puzzling, this combination of good
works and fashionable recreation, until Mrs. Macdonald explained, the
explanation being inferential.

“You see,” said Mrs. Macdonald, “you must take up something, you know,
and then you will get to be known, and it will make all the difference.
Of course if you came out as the wife of a major-general or a
commissioner or a bishop it wouldn’t matter—you could be independent.
But as it is,” continued Mrs. Macdonald with delicate vagueness,
indicating the Brownes’ five hundred a month, “it would be better for
you to take an interest in something, you know. There’s the Home for
Sailors’ Orphans—Mrs. Leek and Mrs. Vondermore—they’re not very
important, though. And there’s Lady Blebbin’s Hindu Widow
Institute—that’s overcrowded now. I believe the very best thing for
you”—with an increase of business-like emphasis—“would be the East
Indian Self-Help Society! Mrs. Walter Luff runs that, and she’s just the
woman to appreciate anybody fresh and energetic like you! I’ve got
influence there too—I’ll get you nominated.”

“But,” said Helen, in some dismay, “it’s not at all likely that I should
be able to be of any use.”

“Use? Of course you will. You’ll be driven to death, but if Mrs. Walter
Luff takes you up, you won’t mind that! Besides,” said Mrs. Macdonald
with an effect of awakened conscience, “the East Indian Self-Helps do a
lot of good. You’re interested in the East Indians, aren’t you—the
Eurasians?”

“I don’t know them when I see them,” said Helen. “I always confuse them
with the Jews and the Greeks.”

“Oh, well, you soon will. As a rule they’re awfully poor, you know, and
give us a lot of trouble in Calcutta. Dear me!” Mrs. Macdonald
ejaculated, looking round, “how pretty you are! But if I were you I’d
have a Mirzapore rug for the middle of the floor; it makes the room so
much richer, you know—shows up everything. And you ought to get two or
three good engravings—there are some lovely new French things at
Thacker’s—only fifty rupees each. Go and see them. But I must be off,”
said this sprightly lady, and Helen was presently again alone, with a
delicate disappearing odour of jessamine and her reflections.

I dropped in that morning too, after all the rest; but it is not
essential to the progress of this narrative that you should be allowed
to gather from my conversation the sort of person that I am.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XI.


IT was clearly impossible to attend Her Excellency’s Drawing-Room in a
tum-tum. The Brownes discussed it with fulness and precision at some
length. Most people resident in Calcutta would have arrived at this
conclusion more rapidly; but as young Browne said, he had never taken a
wife to a Drawing-Room before, and a fellow always went to the levées in
his tum-tum.

“It’s that awful silk tail of yours that’s the difficulty, dear,” said
he. “It might get wound up in the wheels, or Lord knows what. Couldn’t
you take it in a parcel and put it on when you get there?”

I can safely leave Helen’s response to the imagination of all
femininity.

“Then,” said young Browne, “it must be a ticca,” and Helen sighed
compliance, for she hated ticcas.

So does all Calcutta, except the baboos. The ticca is an uncompromising
shuttered wooden box with a door in each side and a seat across each
end. Its springs are primitive, its angles severe. When no man has hired
the ticca, the driver slumbers along the roof and the syce by the
wayside. When the ticca is in action, the driver sits on the top,
loosely connected with a bundle of hay which forms the casual,
infrequent _déjeuner_ of the horses. The syce stands behind, and if the
back shutters are open he is frequently malodorous. There may be some
worldly distinction between the syce and the driver, but it is
imperceptible to the foreign eye. I have never been able to decide which
is the more completely disreputable of the two. Their rags flutter in
competition. There is more variety among the horses. They are large and
gaunt and speckled. They are small and lean and of one colour. They are
fly-bitten, unkempt, knock-kneed, vicious, and nasty. They have bad and
vulgar habits. Some of them have seen Australia and better times, but it
is not evident in their manners. Some of them have been country-bred for
so many generations that the original animal has almost disappeared,
leaving a stricken and nondescript little representative that might more
fitly be harnessed to a wheelbarrow, if wheelbarrows lent themselves to
harness. The ticca-gharry horse is always ridiculous when he is not
pitiful; his gait under pressure is a gallop, and his equipment is made
out in places with pieces of rope and other expediencies. The baboo
loves the ticca-gharry because the baboo knows not mercy and gets a long
ride, yea and seven of his kind with him, for threepence. Calcutta
people hate it for reasons which are perhaps obvious. And for another.
The ticca-gharry directly aids and abets Government in its admirable
system for the valuation of society, represented, as has been seen, by
the Accountant-General. A person who habitually drives in a ticca-gharry
is not likely on the face of it to be in receipt of more than a very
limited income, and is thus twice gazetted as not being a particularly
desirable person to know. It is evident therefore that when the Brownes
decided to go to the Viceregal Drawing-Room in a ticca they bowed to
circumstances.

“Only _don’t_ get one, George,” said Helen, plaintively, “with a pink
rosette on its ear.”

There were a few, a very few, other ticca-gharries in the crowd of
vehicles that blocked the street leading to Government House, and
presently they all found themselves unaccountably in the rear of the
line that was made to preserve order and prevent aggression. The stately
landaus, the snug broughams and the smart victorias rolled naturally
into their places in front. The British policeman whether in Hyde Park
or Imperial India, knows his duty. So that Mr. and Mrs. Browne were not
the first who alighted under the wide porch and made their way with more
trepidation than they allowed to appear, into the crimson-carpeted
precincts of the Burra Lord Sahib.

“Where shall I meet you after—after it’s over, George?” asked Helen
coming out of the cloak-room, very pretty in her soft white silk and the
fresh Wiltshire colour that showed in her cheeks and proclaimed her
newly “out.”

“Oh I’ll find you—I’ll be waiting with the other men outside the door.
Good-bye, dear. Don’t be nervous!”

“I _am_ nervous,” said Mrs. Browne. “But I don’t propose to show it.
Good-bye!” and Mrs. Browne followed in the wake of other shimmering
trains that were being marshalled from corridor to corridor on their way
to the Throne Room, where Their Excellencies, doubtless very bored, were
returning bows to the curtseys of all feminine Calcutta. How very fine
those trains were, some of them. How elaborate and marvellous—how
effective! And indeed they had come forth straight from Bond-street,
many of them, for this very occasion, and therefore, why not? What use,
pray, in being wives and daughters of thousands a month in the land of
exile, if measures could not be sacredly kept in England and “decent
things” got out at least once a year! And how the trains of thousands a
month rejoiced in their contrast with others representing a smaller
_tulub_. I do not speak of Helen’s, for hers was a flowing credit to the
Canbury dressmaker and quite up to date, but of gowns of an elder
fashion and another day that showed themselves with delightful _naïveté_
among the glittering creations of the season. They had seen, some of
them, a great many December dissipations; they had been carefully packed
away through a great many hot weathers and monsoons; they smelt of
camphor; there was a quaintness in their very creases. One or two of
them even told of trousseaux, Helen thought, that must have come to
India in the old sailing days, round Cape Horn. Doubtless this new
little memsahib felt amused in her trim feathers, but I have worn
creases and smelled of camphor myself in my day, and I could have told
her that with five sons at college and a daughter at school in England,
one becomes necessarily indifferent to the fashions, even if the
daughter does spend the holidays with an aunt in the country, free of
expense. But of course one can’t forecast one’s own camphor and creases,
and Helen Browne may never have any.

The dames who waited or who didn’t wait their turn at the various
barriers that regulated the road to Viceroyalty were chiefly imported
English ladies of the usual pale Anglo-Indian type and pretty, either
intrinsically or with the prettiness that comes of being well spoilt.
Most of them had curtseyed formally to Their Excellencies every December
for several years, yet they were quite as happily a-tremble as the
brides or the _débutantes_—the brides of next season.

“I suppose,” Helen overheard one little woman remark with animation,
“Their Excellencies won’t _bite_!” But she continued to behave as if she
thought they would. There were also a few ladies who had not been
imported. These were noticeable for a slight and not unbecoming Oriental
duskiness under the powder, an unusual softness and blackness of eye,
and an oddity of inflection that struck Helen as so pretty and
“foreign.” These ladies usually wore the feathers in their hair—the
three feathers that compliment Royalty—of the same hue as their gowns,
pink or blue or perhaps yellow, which was doubtless a survival of some
lavish and tropical taste for colour that may have been peculiarly their
own. The Ranees and the Maharanees made no attempt to subdue the
gorgeousness of their natural instincts, but showed undisguisedly in
purple and gold and eccentric gems, disposed according to the fashion
that best liked them; and it was Helen’s lot to proceed into the
Viceregal presence immediately behind a Mohammedan lady of enormous
proportions, who represented matrimonially a great Nawab, and did it
wholly in crimson satin.

Their Excellencies stood upon a daïs, near enough to the Throne chair to
suggest their connection with it. There were two stately lines of the
Body-Guard, imperturbable under the majesty of their turbans; there were
five or six A.-D.-C.’s, and secretaries in uniform with an expression of
solemn self-containment under their immature moustaches. And there were,
gathered together at Their Excellencies’ right, the ladies of the
Private Entrée. These ladies were the wives of gentlemen whose interests
were the special care of Government. It was advisable therefore that
their trains should not be stepped on, nor their tempers disarranged;
and they had been received an hour earlier, with more circumstance,
possibly to slower music, different portals being thrown open for the
approach of their landaus—they all approached in landaus. If you stay in
India long enough, Government will see that you get the Private Entrée
before you go, as a rule. That is if you are a person of any
perseverance, and have objected with sufficient stolidity to getting out
of anybody else’s way. This is not invariably the case, however, or John
Perth Macintyre, my husband, with his success in tea and the knowledge
of Indian commerce he has got in the last twenty years, would have been
in the Viceroy’s Council long ago, and Mrs. Macintyre’s landau
approaching with proper distinction in consequence, which it never has.
I have no objection whatever to this coming out in print, for everybody
knows that we wouldn’t take it now. Moreover I daresay it is one reason
why I always notice that the ladies of the Private Entrée are disposed
to giggle slightly and otherwise forget the caste of Vere de Vere, as
they look on upon the curtseys that come after. On this occasion, though
Helen Browne was much too nervous to observe it, they were politely
convulsed—of course with cast-down eyes and strained lips, and in the
manner of good society—at the genuflections of the Mohammedan lady in
red satin. I have no doubt one wouldn’t observe this to the same extent
if one were amongst them.

When it was over it had been very simple. The first A.-D.-C. had handed
Helen’s card to the second A.-D.-C., and so on, until it reached the
Military Secretary who stood at the end, and he had read distinctly
aloud from it the perfectly inoffensive description, “Mrs. George
Browne.” Whereat Mrs. George Browne had gone down several unsteady
inches first before one Excellency, and then before the other, not at
all able to observe the kindly smile with which they encouraged her
unreliable equilibrium. After which she followed the other ladies whose
ordeal was over, with hurrying footsteps and much relief through sundry
tall pillared apartments to the corridor where Mr. George Browne awaited
her, and took his arm with the greatest satisfaction she had yet
experienced in its protection.

Everybody repaired to the ball-room, where, after the last agitated
respects had been received, Their Excellencies also appeared, and Helen
had the opportunity of taking a lesson in social astronomy, and learning
if she chose, how that there is one glory of the sun and another glory
of the moon, and how dark and unamiable those regions may be where the
sun and the moon shine not. Also how an A.-D.-C. may twinkle as a little
star in the firmament, and how a Lieutenant-Governor may be the centre
of a brilliant constellation. Helen noticed a subtle difference between
Their Excellencies and the rest, and put it down in her admiring
innocence to aristocratic lineage or some such vague reason. As a matter
of fact they were the only people in the room who did not directly or
indirectly suggest a life-long interest in pay and promotion, which is
quite enough to make a most vital difference, a most violent contrast,
though it must take some years to discern this. The pay of a Viceroy is
magnificently absolute, and you can’t promote him. I believe that is
arranged by Her Majesty, in order that he may have time to think about
other things. This may look a trifle caustic, but the Perth Macintyres
have out-stayed five Viceroys in Calcutta, and I have found that number
at least to be quite human. Although it is a serious fact that the more
one comes in contact with them the less one is struck with any idea of
their common fallibility, and the more one is inclined to refer to His
Excellency as a very superior mind, and to Her Excellency as “a
perfectly charming woman,” without cavil. The last two Viceroys for
instance have seemed to me to be much more valuable acquaintances than
their predecessors. Can it be that circumstances—chiefly viceregal
dinners—have thrown us more together?

Little Mrs. Macdonald, sitting alone upon a sofa in a corner, welcomed
the Brownes with effusion.

“Do let me go half shares in your husband for a while,” she said to
Helen, making room for them. “Mine has gone off with Mrs. Toote, and I
know what _that_ means. Half an hour’s desertion at least.”

“What did he go for?” asked young Browne.

“Because Mrs. Toote is charming.”

“Do you think so?”

“Don’t _you_? I thought all the men grovelled before Mrs. Toote!”

“I don’t grovel,” said young Browne. “I think she’s a bit of a humbug.”

“But she _has_ good eyes,” Mrs. Macdonald protested.

“Lovely eyes,” Helen chimed.

“Though _I wish_ she wouldn’t spoil them with charcoal the way she
does,” remarked Mrs. Macdonald with amiable unction. “She doesn’t _need_
to, you know.”

“How do you _do_, Captain Delytis?” and Mrs. Macdonald bent very much
forward on the sofa in recognizing a young man in blue lapels, who
suddenly reined himself in as it were, responded profoundly to her
salutation, and then hurried on. “That’s Captain Delytis,” she informed
Helen. “One of the A.-D.-C.’s. Such a dear! He called on me twice last
cold weather, and I was _darwaza bund_ each time. Wasn’t it a shame!”

“I wouldn’t be too remorseful,” remarked young Browne, not without
malice. He had found Mrs. Macdonald _darwaza bund_ frequently, and had
all a black coat’s aversion to the superior charms of blue lapels.
“A.-D.-C.’s have a way, you know, of finding out first.”

“Don’t be nasty, George Browne,” responded Mrs. Macdonald, “besides in
this case it doesn’t apply, for Captain Delytis told me himself how
sorry he was. I daresay they have to resort to that sort of thing
occasionally though, poor things. They have so much to do.”

“Do!” remarked young Browne, with the peculiar contempt mercantile
pursuits so often inspire for the army and the civil service in
Calcutta. “They order dinner, I believe.”

“They have charge of the invitations to everything, so you’d better just
make him properly civil to them,” said Mrs. Macdonald, turning to Helen,
who responded, with perfectly feminine appreciation of the advice, that
she would indeed.

“I wonder,” continued Mrs. Macdonald thoughtfully, “why Mrs. Alec Forbes
didn’t see me just now. Did you notice her?—that tall woman in the
pompadourish gown that passed just now. They say she’s getting too
swagger to see lots of people now that the Simlaites have taken her up
so tremendously, but she’s generally as sweet as possible to me. They
tell a funny story about Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Perth Macintyre—you’ve
seen Mrs. Perth Macintyre: perhaps you can imagine how patronising and
interfering the old lady is! Well, it was when Mrs. Forbes first came
out, and Calcutta wasn’t at all disposed to take to her—a little of the
tar-brush, you know, and that doesn’t go down here. But everybody liked
Alec Forbes, and she had a lot of money, and people came round. Mrs.
Perth Macintyre decided to come round too, and one night at dinner, when
people were discussing this very function, she undertook to encourage
Mrs. Forbes about it. ‘I daresay you’ll be a bit timid, my dear,’ said
she, ‘but you’ll just have to go through it like the rest of us.’ ‘Oh,’
said Mrs. Forbes casually, ‘I daresay it’s nothing to St. James’s!’ Mrs.
Perth Macintyre was sat on for once—_she_ had never been presented at
home. Wasn’t it good?”

“I can’t see what earthly difference it made,” said young Browne, but
his wife could, and turned another page in Part II., Feminine: of the
Book of Anglo-India.

“Why, George,” she said presently, “who’s that?” her husband having
emitted a gruff “How do!” as a gentleman passed them.

“That? Oh, nobody much! Sir William Peete.”

“What did Sir William get his K for?” asked Mrs. Macdonald. “I’ve
forgotten.”

“For trimming up Calcutta the time some Royalty or other came out. He
made a very good municipal milliner, got out a most unusual amount of
bunting. They had to recognise it. The man who drained the place got
nothing, so far as I remember.”

“George, you don’t like him,” Mrs. Browne remarked astutely.

“Oh, yes, I do, for two months in the year, when he likes me. They occur
in the rains. Then he’s passionately fond of everybody who will speak to
him. For the rest of the time he’s exclusively occupied with Sir William
Peete and a few other people of similar standing.”

“What _do_ you mean?” asked Mrs. Macdonald.

“About August and September,” young Browne continued suavely, “Sir
William comes out in boils—comes out copiously. He gets ’em on his neck
and on his face and in the middle of his forehead. He becomes an awful
spectacle. He fawns on his fellow-beings then. As soon as they leave him
he returns to the sublime consideration of the social eminence of Sir
William Peete. Boils are the only known method of reminding him that he
belongs to the human race, so Providence takes it.”

Mr. Macdonald came up at this moment and carried off his wife, leaving
these young Brownes alone on the sofa in the corner of the room, looking
on. They seemed to themselves as they sat there to have drifted into
some tranquil place from which they could watch the steady current
passing, the current that changes every year and yet is always the same,
of English life in India. The old, old ambitions, the stereotyped
political aims, the worn competitions, the social appraisements—how they
have repeated themselves through what illustrations of the great British
average, even in my time! How little more than illustrations the men and
women have been, as one looks back, pictures in a magic lantern, shadows
on a wall! Good illustrations, though sharp reflections of the narrow
conditions they lived in, solemn warnings to those that are so eager to
come after, if only the glamour of India left people with eyes to see.
How gay they were and how luxurious, and how important in their little
day! How gorgeous were the attendants of their circumstance, on the box
with a crest upon their turbans—there is a firm in Calcutta that
supplies beautiful crests. And now—let me think!—some of them in
Circular Road Cemetery—cholera, fever, heat—apoplexy; some of them under
the Christian daisies of England—probably abscess of the liver; the rest
grey-faced Cheltenham pensioners, dull and obscure, with uncertain
tempers and an acquired detestation of the climate of Great Britain. And
soon, very soon, long before the Brownes appear in print, the Perth
Macintyres also will have gone over to the great majority who have
forgotten their Hindustani and regret their khansamahs. Our brief day
too will have died in a red sunset behind clustering palms, and all its
little doings and graspings and pushings, all its pretty scandals and
surmises and sensations, will echo further and further back into the
night.

Of course the Brownes did not moralize thus unpardonably. Why should
they? They sat in their corner and looked at the brilliant scene before
them, and young Browne talked with more or less good-natured cynicism
about everybody he saw, and Helen quite failed to understand why George
should take such ridiculous views of things. And by and by they went
down the broad stairs, past the brown men that stood aside in their
garments of crimson and gold, and the Browne’s ticca-gharry rolled home
with as light-hearted a sahib and memsahib as left Government House that
night. As they had forgotten all about refreshments it was perhaps
fortunate that they were able to find two mutton cutlets cold from the
hands of Kali Bagh and some biscuits and marmalade, when they arrived,
which afforded them keen satisfaction. They could still, poor dears,
with the solace of a cold cutlet enjoy seeing the world go by.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XII.


I HAVE hinted, perhaps broadly, how the Government of India assists
society in determining the Values of People. But this is not wholly done
by columns of figures prepared with great accuracy in the Accounts
Department, it is much facilitated by the discriminating indication of
official position. I feel that official position should have capitals
too—in India it always has. Government determines it profoundly,
awfully, and with a microscope. It affixes a tag to each man’s work and
person describing him and all that he does. There is probably an office
for the manufacture of these, and its head is doubtless known as the
Distributor-General of Imperial Tags to the Government of India. With
all his own time and energy at his disposal for the purpose he might
arrange a designation for himself even more striking than that. He would
date his letters from the Imperial Tag Office, and they would be
composed by the Sub-Assistant-Deputy-Distributor, who would dictate them
to one of the various gentle and oleaginous baboos who are content to
sharpen pencils and permit their white nether draperies to fall round
tall office stools for moderate remuneration without tags. In the hot
weather the Distributor-General would go to Simla and the
Assistant-Distributor would act for him, indulging prematurely in the
airs which are attached to the office of his superior—borrowing his tag
as it were, for the time. And so the days of the Distributor-General of
Imperial Tags to the Government of India, and those of the lady who is
made comfortable under the same title would be days of great glory and
importance, except perhaps those which he spends in England on furlough,
when he would be obliged to leave his halo behind him, with his bearer,
to be kept in order. After an absence of a year or two the halo is apt
to be found a little large, but in such cases it is never cut down, the
head is allowed to expand.

I don’t know of the actual existence of such an office in Calcutta, for
as I have stated, Mr. Perth Macintyre has never had occasion to apply
for a tag—they are comparatively uncommon in what the Simla element is
pleased to call the mercantile community here—but if it does not exist I
am at a loss to understand how they get on without it. Somewhere and
somehow the solemn work of such a Department goes on under the direction
of Heaven, and whether gentlemen in Government service wear their tags
upon their watch-chains or keep them in their pockets, they are all
tagged.

It makes a notable difference. It gives Calcutta for admiration and
emulation a great and glorious company, concerning whom the stranger,
beholding their red-coated chuprassies and the state which attends them,
might well inquire, “Who, who are these?” Then one who knew—and
everybody knows—might make answer, “These are the Covenanted Ones. These
are the Judges of the High Court and all those who dispense the law of
the Raj, the Scions of the Secretariat and other Departments, such
people as commissioners and Collectors who are in authority throughout
the land, the Army! Bow down!” The stranger would then remember the old
saying in the mouths of women concerning those, “Three hundred a year
dead or alive,” with reference to pensions, which at one time was
distinctly the most important quotation in the matrimonial market for
India.

Thereafter follow the great multitude of the Uncovenanted Ones, the men
whose business is with education, and science and engineering, and the
forests and the police, whose personal usefulness dies with them,
probably because they get less pay and less furlough while they live.
The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,
and it has lately entered into the Uncovenanted kind of human heart to
cavil at this arrangement. It has had the audacity to suggest that it is
just as homesick, that it suffers just as much from the climate, and
that its work is just as indispensable as can possibly be the Covenanted
case. I believe the matter is with the Secretary of State, where so many
other matters have tender and indefinite safe keeping. Meanwhile there
are certain positions of lustre among the Uncovenanted also, but they
are few to count and difficult to attain. It is safe to say that a large
proportion of the Uncovenanted Ones keep their tags in their pockets.

I have heard it stated that an expert can tell a Covenanted from an
Uncovenanted individual by his back, given a social occasion which would
naturally evoke self-consciousness. In the case of their wives, one need
not be an expert. Covenanted shoulders are not obviously whiter or more
classically moulded than the other kind, but they have a subtle way of
establishing their relations with Government that is not to be mistaken
even by an amateur. The effect cannot be described, and may be obtained
only by contrast. You look at Uncovenanted shoulders, and you will
observe that they fall away. You consider a pair of mercantile ones, and
however massive and richly girt, you will notice that they suggest a
slight depreciation of themselves. It is only the Covenanted neck that
can assert itself with that impressive unconsciousness that comes from
the knowledge of constant homage—bones, one might say, or no bones. This
is in accordance with the will and intention of the Government of India,
and therefore is as it should be. It is the Raj that has accorded this
lady her consideration, therefore in no quarter is it withheld. The feet
of such a one are stayed upon a rock; it has never been hers to pick her
anxious way among the quicksands of ordinary social advance. Her
invitations are secure. She is acquainted with the number and magnitude
of them, she might almost demand them under a specific regulation. I
have never heard anybody discuss her brains. She occupies a position
which an intellect no doubt adorns, but not indispensably. Her little
frivolities are the care of the Government that holds her in the hollow
of its hand. Society declines to be Pharisaical about them, and asks her
to dinner just the same. The shifting aristocracy of England affords
nothing like her security, her remarkable poise. It is difficult to
understand how, in spite of all this, she can be as charming as she
occasionally is.

It was in my mind to say much sooner that the Brownes were going out to
dinner. They had gone out to dinner on several occasions already among
the people who had known young Browne before he was married, but the
occasions had been informal, the invitations worded “quite quietly,” and
there had been no champagne. This was to be a “burra-khana,” with no
lack of circumstance. The invitation ran thus:—“My dear Mrs. Browne—Will
you and your husband give Mr. Peckle, Mr. Cran and myself the pleasure
of your company at dinner on Tuesday the 27th, at eight o’clock?—Yours
sincerely, J. L. Sayter.”

“Old Sayter!” remarked Mr. Browne. “It’s a chummery, Nell. They called,
the lot of them, that Sunday we went up the river.”

“A chummery—that’s a lot of bachelors living together,” said Helen.

“Not necessarily bachelors—Sayter’s a bachelor, Cran and Peckle are both
married men, wives in England. It’s two years since Mrs. Cran went home,
and Mrs. Peckle’s never been out, so far as I know. In fact, we’ve only
got Peckle’s bare word for the existence of a Mrs. Peckle; maybe it’s a
fiction in self-defence.”

“George!”

“And I don’t know that he doesn’t invent the little Peckles. To hear him
groan over their expenses you’d think there was a new one every year,
and you know that’s manifestly—”

“GEORGE!”

“I was going to say improbable. But I dare say there are a lot of ’em.
Peckle goes home once in three or four years and refreshes his memory as
to number and size. After that he always has a fit of economy and puts
down a horse or two.”

“Poor things!” said Helen, pensively, “an old bachelor and two grass
widowers! How wretched their lives must be! Why, if I had to go home for
my health, dear, I can’t imagine what would become of you!”

“Y—yes! No, indeed, darling! But you sha’n’t go!” An interruption
foolish but inevitable. “As to those old fellows—well, you’ll see. It’s
rather a swagger chummery, very decent men,” young Browne went on, “and
therefore, my dear,” with mock resignation, “they’ll give us all sorts
of unholy indigestibles to eat, and your husband will have liver of the
most frightful description for a week.”

“Liver,” however, very seldom ensues in the early days of matrimony, and
Helen, unacquainted with this domestic bane, laughed it to scorn. It was
her unconscious belief that the idylls of the Brownes could not suffer
from such a commonplace.

[Illustration: MR. SAYTER.]

Mr. Sayter wore a civil tag of considerable size; the other two men were
brokers. Mr. Sayter’s tag was not offensively conspicuous, was not in
fact to be seen at all unless one took the trouble to observe it by
inference. I mean that a critical estimate of Mr. Sayter’s manner would
discover the tag; it might be detected behind his attitude and his
aphorisms and the free way in which he lifted his voice upon all things.
Perhaps it was only observable in the course of time and the progress of
one’s acquaintance with tagography. At first sight Mr. Sayter was a
little grey gentleman with a look of shrinking modesty and a pair of
very bright eyes. Indeed Mr. Sayter bore himself almost with humility,
his shoulders had a very unaggressive slope, and he had a way of casting
down his eyes as he talked to you which did not suggest a lofty spirit.
Custom, however, proved Mr. Sayter’s modesty to be rather like that of
the fretful porcupine, his humility to take amused superior standpoints
of opinion, and his eyes to be cast down in search of clever jests that
were just the least bit wicked. All of which, in Anglo-India, subtly
denotes the tag. The untagged or the undertagged are much more careful
how they behave.

Mr. Sayter came down to meet them in the hall and give Mrs. Browne his
arm up stairs, as is the custom in this place. Helen observed that the
wall was very white and high and undecorated, that the floor was tiled
with blocks of marble, and that the stairs were of broad polished
mahogany. In her host she saw only the unobtrusive Mr. Sayter with a
reassuring smile of characteristic sweetness anxiously getting out of
the way of her train. Young Browne, temporarily abandoned, followed them
up discreetly, and at the top Mrs. Browne was introduced to a Calcutta
dinner-party waiting for a Calcutta dinner.

Among the various low-necked ladies Helen was pleased to recognise Mrs.
Wodenhamer. The presence of Mrs. Wodenhamer at a dinner given even
participially, by Mr. Sayter, indicates as well as anything the
inalienable privileges connected with the wife of a Commissariat
Colonel; but that is by the way. It is perhaps enough to say that the
other ladies were various, one or two young and rather flippant, one or
two middle-aged and rather fat, verging toward Mrs. Wodenhamer; all very
agreeably dressed, except Mrs. Wodenhamer, who wore crimson and black;
all extremely self-possessed, all disposed to be easily conversational.
I might itemize their husbands standing about in degrees of eminence and
worldly plethora fairly proportioned to their waistbands, and sharing
the proud consciousness of having contributed a wife to the occasion. I
ought to mention also Mr. Cran and Mr. Peckle, though I need not dwell
on Mr. Cran’s bearded baldness, or Mr. Peckle’s rosy expansiveness, as
it is quite unlikely that you will have occasion to recognise them out
of their own house. They followed Mr. Sayter down stairs with Mrs.
Wodenhamer and the lady who most resembled her, when the sound of the
gong came up. Helen, as the bride of the occasion, went down on Mr.
Sayter’s arm.

[Illustration: MR. SAYTER GAVE MRS. BROWNE HIS ARM.]

“Well, Mrs. Browne,” said Mr. Sayter presently, giving her an amiable
glance from his soup, “what do you think of us? Now I know what you’re
going to say,” he continued, holding up a bit of crust in a warning
manner. “You’re going to say that you haven’t been here long enough to
form an opinion, or words to that effect. I’m perfectly right, ain’t I?”

Helen admitted that her answer might have been “something like that.”

“But you don’t mean it, you know. Really and truly, if you think a
minute, you’ll find you don’t mean it. You’ve got a lovely opinion of
us, all ready for use, in this last month. And very proper too. The very
first thing everybody does here is to form an opinion of Anglo-Indians.
It can’t be postponed, it’s involuntary. Besides, it’s a duty. We appeal
to the moral side. We call out, as it were, for condemnation. Isn’t that
so, Wodenhamer?”

“Isn’t what so?” said that gentleman. “Certainly. _Na!_ _peg do_,”[79]
to the kitmutgar who wanted to give him champagne.

Footnote 79:

  Whisky and soda.

“You should have been listening. I decline to begin again. I was trying
to convince Mrs. Browne that India is the only country in the world
where people can be properly applied to for their impressions before
they leave the ship—the way they do in America with travellers of
distinction. But there’s no use asking Wodenhamer. He’s never been to
America, and when he does travel he goes incog. to avoid these things.”

Colonel Wodenhamer’s mutton-chop whiskers expanded in recognition of the
joke, “People know it when _you_ travel,” he said.

“That’s sarcastic of you, Wodenhamer, and naughty and unkind. I think he
refers, Mrs. Browne, to the fact that I was gazetted for duty in Assam
last month, and just a fortnight and three days after I came back the
_Briton_ announced that I was going. Do you know the _Briton_? Capital
paper in many respects, but erratic occasionally in matters of
considerable importance. Delicious paper for description of ball
dresses. I revel in the _Briton’s_ ball dresses.”

“Who d’you think does that sort of thing for them?” Mr. Peckle inquired.
“Some lady, I suppose.”

“No indeed, Mr. Peckle,” volunteered one in grey bengaline and gold
embroidery, on the other side of the table. “It’s Captain Dodge, if you
please! I know, because at the Belvedere dance on Friday he came and
_implored_ me to tell him what colour Lady Blebbins was wearing. It was
hyacinth and daffodil faille—the _simplest_ thing, but he was awfully at
a loss, poor fellow! And afterwards I saw him put it down on the back of
his dance-card.”

“I daresay they pay for such things,” Mr. Peckle remarked.

“I fancy Dodge gets a polo pony out of it,” observed Mr. Cran.

“I didn’t give that man Dodge credit for so much imagination,” said Mr.
Sayter. “I wonder if I could induce him to put me in! I’d like to be
treated poetically in the newspapers, for once. But I’m afraid he
won’t,” Mr. Sayter continued sadly, “because I can’t wear mull
muslin—isn’t that what you call it?” to Helen. “I can’t wear it because
I should suffer from the cold, and yet the baboos do! That’s queer, you
know. The baboo is vain enough already, and I’m not vain at all; yet
Heaven permits the baboo to disport himself in the sweetest gossamer and
threatens me with fever and rheumatism if I should even think of such a
thing!”

“But surely, Mr. Sayter,” Helen interposed, “nobody suffers from the
cold _here_!”

“Oh, my dear lady! You don’t know! The cold is the one thing we can’t
get acclimatised to in India! To-night it would be Arctic if we weren’t
dining. _Kitmutgar, bund caro darwaza!_[80] We’ll have a fire up stairs
afterwards.”

Footnote 80:

  Shut the door.

“A _fire_!” said Helen in astonishment.

“Yes. And then we’ll be comfortable. He can leave all the doors and
windows open, you know, so that you can take a severe cold if you want
to. Although this is a country governed by a merciless despotism we
don’t compel people to keep well if they’d rather not.”

“I can’t imagine anybody suffering from the cold in Calcutta!” Helen
declared. “Why, to-day the thermometer stood at eighty-three!”

“Oh,” said Mr. Sayter, “how I envy you.—What! no Roman punch! You are
still warm, you still believe in the thermometer, you still find the
baboo picturesque—I know you do! Thank Heaven, I continue to like Roman
punch—I retain that innocent taste. But I’ve been cold,” said Mr.
Sayter, rubbing his hand, with a shiver, “for years. For years I’ve had
no faith in the thermometer. For years I’ve been compelled to separate
the oil from the less virtuous principles in the baboo. It’s very sad,
Mrs. Browne, but you’ll come to it.”

“I say, Sayter,” remarked young Browne, who was singularly without
respect of persons, considering that he lived in Calcutta, “I can’t have
you frightening my wife about what she’ll come to in Calcutta. I don’t
want her to develop nervous moral apprehensions—based on what _you’ve_
come to!”

Mr. Sayter’s chin sank into his necktie in official deprecation of this
liberty on the part of a junior, and a mercantile one, but he allowed
himself to find it humorous, and chuckled, if the word does not express
too vulgar a demonstration. He leaned back and fingered his empty glass.

“Mrs. Browne,” he said deliberately and engagingly, “will come to
nothing that is not entirely charming.” And he smiled at Helen in a way
which said, “There, I can’t do better than that.” As a matter of fact he
could, and Helen, as she blushed, was blissfully unaware that this was
the kind of compliment Mr. Sayter offered, though not invidiously, to
the wives of mercantile juniors.

“Moral apprehensions,” repeated Mr. Sayter slowly.—“_No!_ I’ve had you
for ten years,”—he apostrophized the kitmutgar—“you’ve grown grey in my
service and fat on my income, and you don’t know _yet_ that I never take
anything with a hole in it like that—and pink vegetables inside the
hole! Mrs. Browne, I’m glad you refrained. That’s the single thing
Calcutta dinners teach—the one great lesson of abstinence! I was very
clever and learned it early—and you see how many of them I must have
survived. But talking of moral apprehensions, I know you’re disappointed
in one thing.”

“No,” said Helen, promptly; “I like everything.”

“Then you haven’t anticipated us properly—you haven’t heard about us.
You ought to be very much disappointed in our flagrant respectability.”

“But I like respectability,” Helen replied, with honesty.

“Oh! There, I’m obliged to consider that you come short again, Mrs.
Browne. You’re not in sympathy with the age. I don’t. I’m very
respectable myself, but that’s not my fault. I’ve never had the good
luck to be married, for one thing; and that, in India, is essential to a
career of any interest. But I was once quite an exceptional, quite an
original, character on that account, and I’m not any more. _Those_ were
the good old times. And to see a beautiful, well-based, well-deserved
reputation for impropriety gradually disappear from a social system it
did so much to make entertaining is enough to sadden a man at my time of
life.”

“Really,” said Helen; and then, with a little bold shivering plunge,
“Were the people out here formerly so very—incorrect?”

“Oh, deliciously incorrect! Scandals were really artistic in those days.
I often wish I had preserved more of them; my memory’s getting old too.
I find myself forgetting important incidents even in those concerning my
most intimate friends. And how people spent their money then! Big
houses—turned into boarding-houses now—heaps of servants,
horses—entertained like princes! Nowadays people live in flats, and cut
the cook, and save to the uttermost cowrie, so they can retire a year
earlier to drink beer with impunity and eat mutton chops with a better
appetite in England. Ignoble age! People—these respectable people—go
home second-class now, too, and pretend to be comfortable. Disgraceful,
I call it.”

“There isn’t the money there used to be, Sayter,” protested Mr. Peckle.
“In those days a man got a decent _tulub_, and carried it away in a bag.
And the vile rupee was worth two shillings.”

Mr. Peckle helped himself to pistachios, and passed the port.

“I believe that explains it!” and Mr. Sayter pressed his lips knowingly
together. “It never occurred to me before. Economy and scandals don’t go
together. Make a man economical, and he becomes righteous in every other
respect. So Government’s to blame, as usual. I think, in view of this,
we ought to memorialise Government to drop the income-tax. You would
sign, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Wodenhamer?”

“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Wodenhamer returned, placidly. “Government ought to
get the income-tax out of those rich natives. I think it’s a shame to
make _us_ pay.”

“Quite right, Mrs. Wodenhamer! These, Mrs. Browne, are called promotion
nuts! They’re useful to effect the permanent removal of your superiors
from office. Very nice and very deadly. You must be sure to have them
when you ask any of Browne’s firm to dinner. No, I’ve a prejudice
against them ever since they were once offered to me in a pudding. I’ve
a sad association with them, too.” And Mr. Sayter looked grave.

“Indeed!” said Helen, not quite sure whether she ought to make her tone
sympathetic.

“Yes, they always come on just as the ladies are leaving,” twinkled Mr.
Sayter; and Helen became aware that Mrs. Wodenhamer was looking at her
with ponderous significance. There was the usual gracious rustle, and
presently the ladies were comfortably and critically ensconced in the
drawing-room, sipping their coffee, at various distances from the
indubitable fire. The conversation was not very general. Mrs. Wodenhamer
discussed something in a suppressed voice on the sofa, with the lady who
approximated her. Helen wondered if it were _jharruns_. There was
apparently some sympathy between the grey bengaline and gold embroidery
and a cream crêpe de Chine and pearls, with very yellow hair. A little
incisive lady in black who happened to be nearest to Helen, asked if she
didn’t think for three _men_ the room was awfully pretty. Helen said she
did, indeed; and the little lady in black continued, with an entirely
unnecessary sigh, that men certainly _did_ know how to make themselves
comfortable, there was no doubt about that. Did Mrs. Browne ever see
anything more exquisite than that water-colour on the easel? Mr. Peckle
had just bought it at the Calcutta Art Exhibition; Mr. Peckle was a
great patron of art and that sort of thing, but then he had to be; he
was a director, or something.

“My husband says,” remarked Helen, with lamentable indiscretion, “that
there isn’t any art in Calcutta.”

“_Does_ he? Oh, I think that’s a mistake. There’s Mrs. Cubblewell, and
Colonel Lamb, and Mrs. Tommy Jackson. Mrs. Tommy paints roses
beautifully, and I do a little on satin myself!” Then, as if it were a
natural outgrowth on the subject, “What _is_ your husband here, Mrs.
Browne?”

“He’s in Macintyre and Macintyre’s.”

“Oh, _yes_!”

Whereafter there fell a silence, during which the little lady in black
seemed to be debating young Browne’s probable connection with the firm
of Macintyre and Macintyre—it sometimes made such a difference—but
before she had properly made up her mind the gentlemen appeared, and
there ensued that uncertain form of conversation which betrays the
prevalent desire that somebody should “make a move.”

Somebody made one finally, before Mr. Sayter actually yawned. The
Brownes drove home rather silently in their ticca-gharry.

“Well?” said young Browne interrogatively, chucking his wife tenderly
under the chin in a moonlit space of Chowringhee.

“I was thinking, George,” said she, “that I didn’t see any photographs
of their wives about the room.”

“No,” said young Browne.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XIII.


INDIA is a country of ameliorations. The punkah is an amelioration. So
is the second-rate theatrical company from Australia, notwithstanding
its twang. So, for those who like it, is the custard-apple. It is our
complaint that our ameliorations are too numerous and too obvious. It is
painful to us that they should obscure everything else in the vision of
the travelling public, and suggest themselves as the main facts of an
idyllic existence which runs sweetly among them to the tinkle of the peg
and the salaams of a loyal and affectionate subject race—which they do.
When the travelling public goes back and represents this to be the case
in the columns of the Home Press we do not like it. The effect is that
we are embittered, and the single one of us who is clever enough writes
the ballad of “Paget M. P.” This is natural and proper. We are none of
us constituted to see our trifling advantages magnified, and our tragic
miseries minimised, especially in the papers, without a sense of the
unpardonable obtuseness of the human race. I do not intend to be drawn
into personal anathema in this chapter though. It will always be so. The
travelling public will continue to arrive and tarry during the months of
November, December, January, and February, and to rejoice in the
realisation of all they have ever read in the Sunday School books. The
travelling public will continue to prefer its own impressions. In
British journalism and Great British Parliamentary opinion there will
always be a stodgy impracticability which the returned Anglo-Indian can
never be strong enough to influence. We are a little leaven, but we
cannot leaven the whole lump.

We die too soon. Besides, it is easier and more comfortable to
philosophise when one is going home next hot weather for good. I am
content, as I write, to think of my ameliorations even with gratitude,
and will only say what so many have said before me, that a protracted
residence under ameliorations is necessary to the full understanding of
how grievous a thing an ameliorated existence may be.

The Brownes were not contented with what Nature does for us in this way
in the cold weather—green peas and cauliflowers, red sunsets, oranges
and guavas at twopence a dozen. Ever since the evening they dined with
Mr. Sayter they had been of opinion that the only people whose existence
was properly ameliorated in Calcutta were the people with the joy of a
fireplace in their houses. As a family young Browne declared they were
entitled to a fireside—it was monstrous that they should lack such an
elemental feature of the domestic habit. True they had a “siggaree,” a
funnel-shaped pot of charcoal, like everybody else—the kitmutgar made
toast with it and the bearer dried damp sheets over it—but one couldn’t
be comforted at the risk of asphyxiation, and besides, it smelled. There
was nothing else, and the Brownes felt that they could not accustom
themselves to gather in a semicircle round a tall Japanese vase, or a
blank space in a white wall fifteen feet high, for anything like
cheerful discourse. They considered that the enduring bliss which they
seemed to have taken with the house lacked this one thing only. It was
impossible to persuade the Spirit of the Hearth to make himself
comfortable in a flower-pot.

It was also impossible to build a chimney—their local tenure being of
that brief and uncertain kind which is popular in Calcutta. A long lease
is not desirable when a neighbourhood may develop typhoid any day, when
beams may take to dropping any night, when one may want six months’
leave just at a season which is unpropitious for sub-letting. All these
conditions obtain in Calcutta, and any of them might be the Brownes’!
Besides, a chimney would cost rupees incalculable.

There were alternatives, however. The Brownes went to the ironmonger’s
to look at them. They were disposed to take an alternative if it could
be had at a moderate price. Most of those they saw were connected with a
length of stove pipe which went through the wall, some of them were
decoratively tiled, some involved a marble mantel, and they all required
an outlay which, for a matter of pure sentiment, seemed large to the
Brownes.

“For forty-nine weeks in the year,” remarked young Browne gloomily, “it
would have to be stored.”

“Wouldn’t it rust?” inquired Helen.

“Inches!”

“I don’t think we can depend on being able to make a new hole in the
wall every time we move,” Mrs. Browne suggested. “The landlord mightn’t
like it.”

“We could always arrange to fill it up with purple glass when we leave.
If we did that the baboos would encourage our perforations. So much do
they love coloured glass that they paper it on one side, and thus
dissimulate.”

Helen thought this ingenious, but it did not alter the fact that the
tiled temptations were expensive. Then the ironmonger’s young man,
rising to the situation, suggested a kerosene stove. You purchased a
kerosene stove, he said, and there it was, your inalienable property, or
words to that effect. It didn’t require no fittings, nor yet being built
into the wall. It would go with you anywheres, it didn’t want a stove
pipe nor yet a hole. It didn’t go in for being to say decorative, not
exactly, but then see how cheerful it was. You never knew till you tried
how cheerful kerosene could be! The young man gave them to understand,
moreover, that its mechanism could be comprehended by a child or a
punkah wallah. And they had no idea to what extent it would reduce the
consumption of coal. The Brownes listened attentively, and when the
young man paused and rested one elbow against a patent punkah machine in
his exhaustion, young Browne made a scientific observation of the stove.
He turned one wick up and the other down. “Seems to work all right,” he
said to Helen.

“Perfectly, sir,” said the ironmonger’s young man.

Young Browne looked at him curiously. “You haven’t been long out?” he
remarked.

“No, sir. Only three weeks, sir. I came from this department in William
W’itely’s, sir.”

“I remember,” said Mr. Browne, “they do like to sell things there. Three
months in Calcutta and you won’t care a blow.”

“That so, sir?” the young man returned, smilingly. “I ’ope not, sir, for
the sake of business.”

“It is. What do you think of this thing, Helen? Shall we have it sent
up?”

“It would be nice for toffee,” said Helen. “And I’m sure I can make
toffee cheaper than the cook does. I dare say it would save us a lot in
toffee, George.”

“I’m sure it would. And it’s only thirty-five rupees—about two pounds
seven, at the current rate of exchange. It isn’t just my ideal of a
fireside, but it seems the best we can do.” And the next morning the
kerosene stove arrived on the heads of four coolies, at the Brownes’
suburban residence.

[Illustration: MRS. LOVITT.]

The night was propitiously and comfortably cold. As they drove home from
tennis at Mrs. Jack Lovitt’s, muffled up in the striped flannel jackets
with which Calcutta protects itself from the inclemency of the weather
after tennis, Helen declared, with the kerosene stove in anticipation,
that it was really almost piercing. “It’s a pity, though, George,” she
said regretfully, “that we were _quite_ in such a hurry about buying the
stove, for I was telling Mrs. Lovitt about it, and she said she was so
sorry she didn’t know we wanted one—we could have had theirs, and it’s
in perfect order, for ten rupees.”

“Oh, next cold weather,” returned her lord, “we’ll have the pleasure of
selling ours for ten rupees instead. It comes to much the same thing,
you see.”

It is almost impossible to persuade a sahib of Calcutta to take his
domestic accounts seriously. If his natural proclivities are in that
direction, he is usually not to be respected.

The Brownes had a hump for dinner, and a hump costs a rupee and several
annas. Nevertheless they hurried through it, the more speedily to avail
themselves of their unaccustomed luxury in kerosene, to “cluster round
the cheerful blaze,” as George Browne put it, which stood solemnly
between two long windows in the drawing-room awaiting a match. Entering,
they found the bearer, the kitmutgar and the mallie kneeling about it,
with varied expressions of concern, the machine still grim and black, in
the midst of a pervasive odour of kerosene. The Brownes felt palled. It
was not what they had expected.

“_Bilcul na hona sucta_,”[81] said the bearer, rising and surveying the
thing as if it were an obdurate Hindu deity.

Footnote 81:

  Simply it may not be!

“What does he say?” inquired Mrs. Browne. Mrs. Browne was always
inquiring what the bearer said. Mr. Browne was rapidly becoming a
peripatetic hand-book of Hindustani. He implored his wife to have a
_munshi_,[82] and Helen thought it would be delightful but sternly
declined on the score of economy. So young Browne had no surcease.

Footnote 82:

  Instructor.

“_Albut hona sucta!_”[83] said he, going upon his own knees before the
refractory divinity. Helen stood by with superior interest and knitted
brows, after the manner of women.

Footnote 83:

  Without doubt it may be!

“_Dya-silai_ HUM _ko-do_!”[84] enunciated the sahib.

Footnote 84:

  Give ME the matches.

Deep relief became visible upon the faces of the bearer, the kitmutgar,
and the mallie. The sahib was omnipotent.

Mr. Browne presently discovered that the wicks had dropped into the oil
reservoirs. He proceeded to take the newly imported fireside upon his
lap, so to speak, and unscrew it, his wife remarking meanwhile that she
supposed it was quite safe. He rescued the wicks, but Helen has since
mournfully given me to understand that certain of the garments he had on
were never tenable afterwards.

Then they applied a match to engender the sacred fire upon their hearth,
and it was engendered in two long narrow flames that flared up in
yawning tin chasms on either side and sent before them a wreathing
blackness of smoke which escaped rapidly through the holes on the top
for the saucepan and the gridiron.

“It _is_ cheerful,” said Helen insistently. “But it seems to need a
stove pipe after all,” she added, in doubt.

“Not at all,” said her husband, “only to be turned down.” So he turned
it down to a wavering blue and yellow line, and closed the doors.

“Finish _hai_?” inquired the bearer, and the sahib said yes, it was
finished, so the bearer, the kitmutgar and the mallie repaired to the
simpler solaces of sentimental organisations less subtly devised than
ours.

These two exiled Brownes drew up chairs and tried to feel at least
anticipative appreciation. There were two round transparent holes in the
doors through which they could see a reflection of their glowing hearth.
They leaned towards it and spread out their hands. Young Browne
remarked, with a chill smile, that it was certainly warmer than it had
been. They pulled their chairs closer together, in order, I have no
doubt, to impede the heat that might escape into other quarters of the
room. Helen slipped her hand into her husband’s, and together they
looked thoughtfully into the depths of the burning wick. I think the way
in which they must have regarded this thing, which was to mean for them
the essence of home life in an unhomelike country, and the warm glow of
home love caught and held where it is reputed apt to stray abroad, was
not altogether laughable though. In fact——

“_Nellie!_” exclaimed young Browne, and had occasion to bring his chair
closer still. There was a moist contact of cheeks and a succession of
comforting silences. The kerosene stove continued to burn excellently,
but was disregarded.

“It looks like some kind of—of engine, doesn’t it, George?” Mrs. Browne
recovered herself sufficiently to say.

“Yes. Beastly thing!” concurred young Browne in further disparagement.
Then they began to observe the effect of the heat on the varnish. It
took the form of a hot penetrative unpleasant smell that radiated from
the kerosene stove into every quarter of the room.

“I expect it will wear off,” said young Browne gloomily, “but we’d
better put the thing out in the compound every night until it does.”

It has never worn off, however. Helen, with responsible memory of the
thirty-five rupees, used it conscientiously all last cold weather. She
did serious and light-minded cooking with it while she suffered the
delusion that she was Kali Bagh’s superior—inevitable but short—and she
made almost enough toffee upon it to justify its expense, if it had been
necessary to subsist upon toffee. Whenever anything could be done with
it the Brownes did it. They had it lighted to welcome their return from
burra-khanas and Government House dances, and on one occasion Helen sat
for half an hour before it in her most cherished gown, under a shower of
softly falling black flakes of carbonized kerosene without being aware
of it—the result of an injudicious lighting and forgetting on the part
of the bearer. Many an evening they sat in its presence making efforts
at hilarity and trying to forget the odours of varnish and kerosene—in
the end they always confessed it inadequate. It had a self-contained
moroseness, it never snapped or sparkled or died down. When they went to
bed they turned it out. Through its two round eyes it mocked their
homesick effort after the cheer of other lands. The bearer admired it
and took pride in setting it alight. But the Brownes regarded it with
feelings that grew constantly more “mixed.” It made no ashes and gave no
trouble, and when they didn’t want it it was not there—all of which
seemed additional offences.

The old kite that surveyed them always through the window from his perch
in the sago palm beside the veranda said nothing, but if they had been
intelligent they might have heard the jackals that nightly pillaged the
city’s rubbish heaps, howling derision at the foolishness of a sahib who
tried to plant his hearth-stone in India.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XIV.


MRS. BROWNE was not permitted to know any of her immediate neighbours,
which she thought unfortunate. It was a pity in a way, and yet not a
great pity, for if I know anything about Helen Browne she would not have
been able to assimilate her neighbours comfortably. Unless they live
with the great and good in Chowringhee, it is often difficult for
Calcutta people to do this. It is said that the missionaries manage it,
but about this no one is certain, for between Calcutta people and the
missionaries there is a great gulf fixed. Calcutta interprets the
missionary position with strict logic. It was not Calcutta—Calcutta
proper—that the missionaries came out, second class, to establish
intimate spiritual relations with, but the heathen. Calcutta is careful,
therefore, not to interfere in any way with this very laudable
arrangement; the good work must not be retarded by any worldly
distraction. Calcutta contributes to it, in her own peculiar way, by
allowing the missionaries the fullest possible opportunity for becoming
acquainted with the heathen. If one does not readily suspect the
self-denial in this, it is because one is predisposed against society—it
is perhaps because one has been snubbed.

I cannot say with accuracy, therefore, whether a missionary in Mrs.
Browne’s place would have known Radabullub Mitterjee, Bahadur, who lived
next door to the west; doubtless she would have made attempts, at least,
to introduce herself to the ladies who divided the matrimonial dignities
of his establishment; but it did not occur to Helen that there was any
opening for such advances upon her part. Even the slits of windows which
commanded the Browne compound were generally shut and always
iron-barred; no dangerous communication from an unveiled memsahib who
ate with her husband could get in there. It was a little narrow, silent,
yellow house, too tall for its width, much overgrown with heavy-hanging
trees, and it stood a long way back from the road, looking out on a
strip of compound, through a glass door, purple in places and green in
places, and altogether brilliant to behold. The strip of compound was a
marvel of rectangular crookedness. It was a good deal taken up with a
tank, a long narrow tank covered with a generous green slime, dug rather
sidewise. The rest of the place was divided into small sharp-angled-beds
with rows of stones. They were very much at odds with each other, and
nothing grew in them but a few ragged rose-bushes, and flagrant things
that came of their own accord. Almost every evening R. Mitterjee,
Bahadur, went out to drive. The Brownes used to meet him in the broad
Red Road that cleaves the Maidan, where the landaus, and victorias, and
tum-tums of Calcutta amuse themselves by passing and repassing, and
bowing to each other, in the pleasant part of the day, before the quick
darkness comes and sends them all home to dinner. Nobody bowed to
Radabullub, and he bowed to nobody, though assuredly no sahib drove in
so resplendent a gharry as his. It was built on the most imposing lines,
with ornamentation of brass, and a beautiful bunch of flowers painted on
either door-panel. And it was pulled by two of the most impetuous
prancing steeds in silver mounted harness, that the soul of a Bahadur
could desire. The silver mountings were very rusty, and the prancing
steeds lamentably weak in their fore legs, but the soul of a Bahadur is
not perturbed by little things like that. Radabullub leaned back behind
them superciliously, folding his arms over his tight silk coat of pink
brocade, or twisting his moustache. With his embroidered yellow turban
at a certain angle, this Bahadur was a killing fellow—very much a man of
the world indeed, but not enough to know a good horse when he saw it, or
to be able to drive it if he did, or to understand what earthly
difference it made to a sahib how his servants were dressed. His own sat
behind in a cluster—he had more of them than any sahib—in turbans of the
colours they most fancied, and alike only in the respect that they were
all dirty and down at heels, if the expression, in a shoeless case, is
properly applied. But when it was necessary to prepare the way none
shouted louder or ran faster than the servants of Radabullub Mitterjee,
who probably thought that there ought to be a sensible difference
between the apparel of a syce and pink brocade, and approved it.
Radabullub did not always drive in the Red Road alone. Sometimes the
cushion beside him was occupied by a very small and high-shouldered
edition of himself, encased in blue satin with gold edgings. This
Bahadur in embryo folded his arms like his father and looked at the Red
Road with equal superciliousness; indeed, I fancy he took much the same
views of life generally. They are early inherited in Bengal.

But the ladies, the Mesdames Mitterjee, when they issued forth from the
little silent yellow house, which they did but seldom, went most
securely in charge and under cover, and Mrs. Browne might look in vain
for any glimpse of their fascinations behind the purple curtains of
their palanquins, as they passed her gate.

[Illustration: THE LADIES WENT MOST SECURELY IN CHARGE AND UNDER COVER.]

I don’t know the name of the people on the other side, and neither does
Mrs. Browne. They seemed to live a good deal in the veranda in an untidy
way. Helen could always command a man asleep there in pyjamas from her
drawing-room window, up to eleven o’clock in the morning. They paid no
more attention to their compound than Radabullub did, but they had a
leggy bay colt tied up there upon which the family lavished the
tenderest affection. When the Brownes drove home in the early darkness
from tennis, they could usually see a casual meal going on through an
open window at which the discourse was very cheerful and general, the
men in shirt-sleeves, the ladies posed negligently with their arms upon
the table. There was a baby, a cracked piano, and a violin in the house,
but the baby had a good constitution and went to bed at eight o’clock,
and it did not seem to the Brownes, as they listened to the songs their
neighbours sang after dinner, that the piano was very much out of tune.
They were old old songs that everybody knew, sung with great spirit and
energy, chiefly in chorus, and Mrs. Browne’s slipper kept time to them
with great enjoyment. A boisterous old song in Calcutta was a pleasant
anomaly and struck through the mango trees like a voice from home. The
hearts of the Brownes warmed towards their neighbours as they smote the
languid air with “Do ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?” and as it
came again and again, Mr. and Mrs. Browne smiled at each other and
joined softly in the chorus, being comforted thereby. It was rather an
additional attraction that these harmonies grew a little beery later in
the evening. Young Browne could drink beer in Calcutta only under pain
of his own later displeasure—a bitter thing for an Englishman.

They were jockeys, these neighbours of the Brownes’—from Australia very
likely, with the last batch of Waler horses. They belonged to the class
Calcutta knows collectively, as a sub-social element, that nevertheless
has its indeterminate value, being white, or nearly so, as a rule. The
aristocracy of the class is probably represented by the commissariat
sergeants and the local police, and I have no doubt it observes its
rules of precedence, though it is unlikely that Mrs. Browne’s neighbours
had much regard for them. On certain days of the year Calcutta makes
brief acquaintance with “Light Blue and Canary,” or “Green Pink
Sleeves,” but his wife and baby go on, one might say, without official
sanction of any sort; they are permitted. So it doesn’t matter to
anybody what Light Blue and Canary’s Christian name is—his cap and
sleeves are enough. Occasionally the reporters are obliged to find it
out when Light Blue and Canary breaks his wretched neck and half ruins a
beautiful horse, and the public have to be informed of it. Then his
friends dress Light Blue and Canary in mufti and bury him early next
morning in Circular Road Cemetery, and there is the most annoying
confusion when both he and his horse have to be scratched for the
afternoon’s races. As to the wife and baby under these circumstances,
they still go on, it is supposed.

I regret to say that the Brownes were bounded on the north by a bustee.
It is not necessary to explain that a bustee is an unsavoury place, the
word has a taste and a smell of its own. One is always aware of the
vicinity of a bustee, chiefly because of the bovine nature of the fuel
it consumes. It is impossible to put it less vulgarly than that. All
over Calcutta, in the cold weather, there hangs at set of sun a blue
cloud of smoke with an acrid smell. It offends the nostrils of the very
Viceroy, yet it is not in the power of any municipal Commissioner to put
out the fires that send it up. It curls through a thousand roofs, the
tiled roofs of the country, representing much humble comfort and many
humble dinners, and every morning on the Maidan you may see ugly old
women stooping to collect the material for it. Bustees, moreover, are
never drained. They and their inhabitants fester comfortably through the
long blue and green Indian days unconscious that their proximity does
not enhance rents.

Mrs. Browne found her bustee neighbours more approachable. Her
dressing-room window overlooked the place and gave her a point of
speculation which she enjoyed quite shamelessly. A young papoia tree
flourished in a corner of the roof she looked down upon, and various
forms of vegetables fringed it. It was the daily promenade of the family
cock, and occasionally a black goat took the air there. The cock flew
up, but the goat always made use of the family staircase. The family
lived mostly in the yard—three old women and five babies. The old women
wore various kinds of rags, the babies were uniformly dressed in a
string. The biggest baby carried the littlest about, astride her hip,
and they all played together in one corner, where they made marvels in
mud, just as children who wear clothes do. The old women scolded them
severally and collectively, especially when they came and teased for
breakfast with pathetic hands upon their little round stomachs. The
oldest of the old women cooked the breakfast, and she would not have it
hurried. She cooked it in a single pot that stood on a mud fireplace in
the middle of the yard, squatting before it, feeding the flames with one
hand and stirring the mess with the other. Helen could see what she put
in it—rice, and more rice, and yellow dhol, and last of all pieces of
fish. As she cooked the woman looked up at Helen now and then and
smiled, amused that she should be interested in so poor an occupation—a
memsahib! And the babies, when they discovered her, stood open-mouthed
and gazed, forgetting the pot. In the house they divided it upon
plantain leaves, a popular dinner service in Bengal; and when the babies
issued forth again, in file, their appearance was quite aldermanic. The
old women perhaps reposed, the sun grew hot on the window-ledge, and
Helen thought of other things to do. In the evening, though, when the
hibiscus bushes threw long shadows across the garden path, and Helen
waited for her lord by the gate as a bride will, the babies came round
through devious lanes to assert themselves as the same babies of the
morning and eligible for pice. Helen felt an elementary joy in bestowing
it, and the babies received it solemnly, as entirely their due, with
little salaams for form’s sake. There was tremendous interest on both
sides, but beyond the statement that the babies lived in the little
house, and the memsahib in the big one, conversation was difficult, and
Helen thought with concern of the vocabulary that would be necessary in
order to teach them about man’s chief end. They came every day to watch
the going forth of the Brownes in the tum-tum, and made a silent, open
eyed, admiring little group beside the gate, at which the pony usually
shied. Then young Browne would crack his whip in the air very fiercely
indeed, and address them in language that sounded severe, though it had
no perceptible effect. Even the babies in Bengal accept the sahib as a
blustering, impolite person of whom nobody need be afraid.

And then opposite, across the weedy road and the stagnant ditch, a
riotous Rajah resided, in a wonderful castellated place with four or
five abandoned acres around it. The Rajah was very splendid and
important. He had a slouching guard at his gate with a gun, who probably
bullied the dhoby; and when he went abroad in the evenings, four badly
uniformed horsemen, and no less, pranced uncertainly behind his
carriage. The Rajah gave entertainments to European gentlemen of
circumstance, whereat I do not think any single variety of food or drink
procurable in Calcutta was omitted; but ladies did not participate,
except, of course, those who contributed to the entertainment—the ladies
of the nautch, or those of a stray theatrical company whose performances
the Rajah fancied. In return the Rajah was invited to evening parties at
Government House, where he appeared in a turban and diamonds, supremely
oiled and scented, stood about in corners with his hands behind his
back, and never for an instant dreamed in his disdainful Hindu soul of
eating at the Viceroy’s supper-table. At the end of the cold weather he
went back to his own state, where he sat on the floor and hatched
treason against the British with both majesty and comfort. In the
evening his domain was dotted with the cooking-fires of his people, who
made a sort of tented field of it. The wind blew the smoke across the
Brownes’ compound, causing young Browne to use language uncomplimentary
to Rajahs, and that was all they ever had to do with this one.

I mention the local isolation of these young people because it is
typical of Calcutta, where nobody by any chance ever leans over anybody
else’s garden gate. Doubtless this has its advantages—they are probably
official—but Helen, not being official, found it cramping.

There was always the garden, though; she had that much liberty. The
garden had begun with the Brownes, it was a contemporary success. There
had been desolation, but you have heard how they engaged a mallie.
Desolation fled before the mallie by daily degrees, though he was seldom
seen in pursuit of it. When gardeners work in Christendom, this one
sought repose and the balmy hubble-bubble, or bathed and oiled and ate
in his little mud house under the pipal tree. It was very early in the
morning, at crow-caw one might say in poetic reference to the dawn in
India, that the mallie scratched and scraped along the garden beds with
his wonderful little trowel, and spoke to the flowers so that they
sprang up to answer him. When the shadow of the house fell on the
hibiscus bushes he came out again, and slaked the hot beds with water
from the tank in many buckets. Here and there he stooped over them like
a glistening brown toad-stool, but Helen never knew what he did or his
reason for doing it—that was hid with the mallie-lok.

As to the garden, there was not a tropical seed in it, they were all
English flowers, which made the mallie’s excellent understanding with
them more remarkable, for they spoke a different language. It was not
much of a garden, there was absolutely no order or arrangement—it would
have worried me—but the Brownes planted a vast amount of interest and
affection and expectation in it; and it all grew. There were such
nasturtiums as Helen longed to show her mother, there were phloxes white
and purple, pansies too, and pinks, and not a quiet corner but was
fragrant with mignonette. A row of sunflowers tilted tall against the
side of the house, and they actually had corn-bottles, and balsams and
daisies. Violets too—violets in exile, violets in pots, with the
peculiar property that violets sometimes have in India, of bringing
tears to the eyes if one bends over them.

The Brownes began by counting them—the first pansy-bud was an event, and
I have heard references between them to “the day the sunflower came
out.” They chronicled daily at breakfast: “Two nasturtiums and a pink,”
“two pinks, three nasturtiums, and the monthly rose,” with great
gratulation, while I am convinced neither of them looked twice at the
fine bunch I sent round occasionally from my garden while their garden
was growing. It grew so fast, their garden, that presently, if you met
them in society, they could talk of nothing else. It was new to them,
this friendly solace of the flowers of home. One would have thought it
specially invented for their honeymoon, whereas the rest of us demanded
it every cold weather, as regularly as the punkah on the fifteenth of
March. Mrs. Browne used to go about saying what a wonderful amount of
comfort one could get out of a verbena, if it were only the right
colour, without the slightest suspicion of the triteness of the remark;
and young Browne would show you his home-grown button-hole, as if no
other man in the place possessed one. It was eminently good for them, as
it is for all of us. To some of us, you know, England at last becomes a
place where one dies daily of bronchitis, and is obliged to do without a
kitmutgar; but this never happens if every cold weather one plants one’s
self round about with English flowers. They preserve the remnant of
grace which is left in the Anglo-Indian soul, and keep it homesick,
which is its one chance of salvation. Young Browne seldom said anything
cynical in the garden, and as for Helen, it was simply Canbury to her.
She could always go down and talk of home to her friends in the
flower-beds, who were so steadfastly gay, and tell them, as she often
did, how brave and true it was of them to come so far from England,
forgetting, perhaps, that from a climatic point of view nasturtiums like
heathendom. And in the evening the smoke of the hubble-bubble was lost
in the fragrance of the garden.

Mrs. Browne says that if I am writing about their compound, I ought not
to omit to mention the fowl-yard, which was situated at one end of it,
near the stable. It was another experiment in economy—the cook used such
a quantity of eggs that the Brownes saw no reason why they should not be
produced on the premises. So they enclosed a fowl-yard and stocked it,
and the cock vied with the crows in informing them of the earliest hint
of daylight. But the Brownes do not now advise the keeping of fowls on
the ground of economy; they say, indeed, that only the very rich can
afford to keep them. It seems that the syce kindly supplied their food
out of the pony’s gram, charging the deficit to the memsahib, who also
paid liberally for barley, a visionary provision at which her birds had
never a pick. They were, notwithstanding, sound healthy hens, and the
marvel was that they did not lay—except an egg or two a week for pure
ostentation. Kali Bagh was doing a good business with the rest,
supplying them to Mrs. Browne at full market rates, and to Mrs. Green
Pink Sleeves at about half, to secure her custom. The hens in the
meantime clucked cheerfully, and Helen was in a parlous state when in
the end they had to be cut off untimely and stewed. “But with ruin
staring us in the face,” she said, “what else could we do!”

This will serve as an explanation to posterity, if any should inquire
why it was that toward the end of the nineteenth century in Bengal only
Members of Council were in the habit of keeping hens.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XV.


THE cold weather is not a season of unqualified delight in Calcutta, in
spite of the glorious coming of the Raj into his winter palace, and the
consequent nautch. The cold weather has its trifling drawbacks. The
mosquitoes and the globe-trotters are so bad then, that some people have
been known to prefer the comparative seclusion they enjoy when the
thermometer stands at 103° in the shade, when the mosquitoes have gone
to the Hills, pursuing the fat of the land, and the globe-trotters to
northern latitudes seeking publishers.

It may be set down as an axiom that the genus globe-trotter is unloved
in Calcutta. It may also be set down as an axiom that it is his own
fault, for reasons that may appear. But there are globe-trotters and
globe-trotters, and of some the offence is venial—nothing more, perhaps,
than that they make the hotels uncomfortable, and put up the price of
native curiosities. And some are amusing in their way, and some bring
English conversation with them; and I have known one to be grateful for
such poor favours as he received, but he was not a globe-trotter that
took himself seriously. It is also possible, I believe, if one lives in
India long enough, to come across a globe-trotter who is modest and
teachable, but we have been out here only twenty-two years, and I am
going home without having seen one.

The Parliamentary globe-trotter represents the species which has
impressed itself most upon Anglo-India. He has given a character and a
finish, as it were, to the whole genus. He has made himself so prevalent
and of such repute that, meeting any stalwart stranger of cheerful
aggressive countenance at His Excellency’s board, we are apt to inquire
amongst ourselves, “of what district?” hoping for reasons private to
Anglo-India, that it may not be a Radical one. The initials “M. P.” have
become cabalistic signs. They fill us with the memory of past
reproaches, and the certainty of coming ones. They stand for much
improper language, not entirely used in India. They inspire a terrible
form of fear, the apprehension of the unknown, for the potentials of the
globe-trotting M. P. are only revealed in caucus, the simple
Anglo-Indian cannot forecast them. Regularly with December he arrives,
yearly more vigorous, more inquisitive, more corpulent, more disposed to
make a note of it. We have also noticed an annual increase in his
political importance, his loquacity, and his capacity to be taken in,
which he would consider better described as ability to form an
independent opinion. At this moment we are looking forward to the last
straw in the shape of Lord Randolph Churchill.

Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P., was not so great a man as Lord Randolph
Churchill when he arrived in Calcutta last cold weather; what he may
have become since, by the diligent use of his Indian experiences and
information collected “on the spot,” I have no means of knowing. George
Browne’s father was one of Mr. Batcham’s constituents, and this made Mr.
Batcham willing to stay with the Brownes while he was inspecting
Calcutta, and collecting advice to offer to the Viceroy. He kindly put
up with them for several weeks, and when he went away he gave four annas
to the sweeper.

Mr. Batcham occasionally described himself as one of the largest
manufacturers in the north of England, and though the description leaves
something to be desired, it does suggest Mr. Batcham. He was large,
imposing in front, massive in the rear. He was gray-whiskered, of a
rubicund countenance, of a double chin. He wore a soft felt hat a little
on one side, and his hands in his pockets, a habit which always strikes
me as characteristic of a real manufacturer. He was very well
informed—they all are. He had a suave yet off-hand manner, a
business-like smile, a sonorous bass voice, and a deep, raging and
unquenchable thirst for facts.

Mr. Batcham was very much aware of his value to the Brownes as a new
arrival from England—a delicate appreciation of himself, which is never
wanting to a globe-trotter. Mr. Batcham blandly mixed himself up with
the days when people came round the Cape in a sailing-ship, or across
the sands of Suez on a camel, and invested himself with all the
sentimental interest that might attach to a fellow-countryman discovered
in the interior of Bechuanaland. A generous philanthropic instinct rose
up and surged within him as he thought, in the midst of his joyful
impressions of the tropics, how much pleasure his mere presence was
probably imparting. He almost felt at moments as if he had undertaken
this long, arduous, and expensive journey in the interest of the Brownes
as well as those of his constituents.

The great concourse of his kind in the hotels, the telegrams in the
morning’s _Englishman_, the presence of overland cheese, the electric
light, and the modern bacteriologist, should have rebuked this
pretension somewhat, but it is doubtful if anything could do that. “I
saw both your parents before I sailed,” said Mr. Batcham, in liberal
compensation, as it were, for his first dinner, “and left them quite
well.” And when young Browne replied that since then he was sorry to say
his mother had had a bad attack of bronchitis, however, by the last mail
they had heard she was getting over it, the damper was only momentary,
and Mr. Batcham proceeded to inform them that Parnell was dead.

Oh, he was sufficiently communicative, that Batcham, sufficiently
willing to impart his impressions, as expansive, by the time they got to
the joint, as ever you liked. He had a certain humorous perception of
what was expected of him. As a “globe-trotter,” he was familiar with the
expression, and applied it to himself jovially without shame. The
perception was incomplete, and therefore did not make Mr. Batcham
uncomfortable. However, he understood perfectly that globe-trotters as a
class were frequently and prodigiously taken in. Acting upon this, Mr.
Batcham made his incredulity the strong point of his intelligence, and
received certain kinds of information with an almost obvious wink. That
very first night at dinner, he proclaimed himself to the Brownes a
person who could not be imposed upon—useless to try. “Coming down from
Benares,” said Mr. Batcham, “I travelled with a couple of men who said
they were indigo planters, and so they may have been for all I know.
Anyhow they spotted me to be a globe-trotter—said they knew it by the
kind of hat I wore—and then they proceeded to fill me up about the
country. One fellow said he didn’t own a yard of indigo land himself;
always got the peasants to grow it for him; and the other went into some
complicated explanation of how blue indigo was got by squeezing green
leaves. All sorts of yarns they told me. How the natives wouldn’t eat
factory sugar, because they believed it defiled in the preparation, but
preferred drain water to any other. How a Hill woman would make nothing
of carrying me on her back a thousand feet steady climbing. How in the
part of the country we were going through, it was so hot in June that
men had servants to drench them with water in the middle of the night
regularly. I saw they were enjoying it, so I let them go on—in fact I
rather drew them out, especially about indigo. Took it all in and cried
for more, as the babies do for patent medicine. Then when we got out at
the station here I said, ‘Thank you gentlemen, for all the “information”
you have given me. It has been very entertaining. Of course you will
understand, however, that I don’t believe a word of it. Good morning!’ I
fancy those two indigo planters will hesitate before they tackle their
next globe-trotter. I never saw men look more astonished in my life.”

“I should think so!” exclaimed young Browne; “what they told you was
wholly and literally true.”

Mr. Jonas Batcham looked at his host with a humorous twinkle. “Don’t
_you_ try it on,” said he.

Although Mr. Batcham found it advisable to shed so much of the light of
his countenance upon the Brownes, as I have said, it was native India
that he came to see and report upon. And to this end he had read one or
two of the most recent publications on the subject, works produced, that
is to say, by our very most recent visitors, smoking from the London
press before their authors’ names were dry in the Bombay hotel register.
These volumes had given Mr. Batcham comprehensive ideas of native India,
and he knew that between Cape Comorin and Peshawur were lying two
hundred and fifty million people urgently in need of his benevolent
interference. They were of different races, religions, customs, and
languages—Mr. Batcham had expected to find that and had equipped himself
for it by learning the names of almost all of them. He was acquainted
with several of their gods, he knew that Ganesh had an elephant’s head,
that Kali loved the blood of goats, and that Krishna was the source of
all things. He was aware also that it was not proper to speak of
Mohammedan rajahs or Hindoo sheiks, and he had informed himself upon the
subject of Eastern polygamy. Mr. Batcham was a person of intelligence
who did not travel without preparing his mind, and though according to
his own modest statement there was still a great deal that he didn’t
know about India, it was open to an appreciative person to doubt this.
In one direction Mr. Batcham had prepared his mind with particular care,
so that the very slightest impression could not fail to be deep and
permanent—in the direction of the wrongs, the sufferings, the grievances
under British rule, of his two hundred and fifty million fellow-subjects
in India. Upon this point Mr. Batcham was tender and susceptible to a
degree that contrasted singularly with his attitude towards the rest of
the world, which had never found reason to consider him a
philanthropist. This solicitude about his Indian brethren was the more
touching perhaps on that account, and the more remarkable because it
found only cause for grief and remorse in the condition of native India.
Any trifling benefits that have accrued to the people through British
administration—one thinks of public works, sanitation, education, courts
of justice, and so forth—Mr. Batcham either depreciated or ignored. We
had done so little, so “terribly little,” as Mr. Batcham put it,
compared with what we might have done, and of that little so much had
been done badly! Daily Mr. Batcham discovered more things that had been
neglected, and more things that had been done badly. He looked for them
carefully, and whenever he found one he wept audibly and made a note of
it. Time would fail me, as the preacher says, to recount all the
iniquities that came under Mr. Batcham’s observation during the weeks he
spent in India, and I am unworthy to describe the energy and
self-forgetfulness with which he threw himself into the task of
“investigating” them, always with the most copious notes. There was the
fact that both opium and country spirit were sold to the innocent Hindu,
not only with Government cognisance but actually under Government
regulations, the outrage to every Briton’s conscience being that
revenues were derived therefrom. The Government fattened, in Mr.
Batcham’s graphic figure, upon the physical misery and moral degradation
of its helpless wards. Mr. Batcham searched his mind in vain to find a
parallel to this, strange as it may seem in connection with his accurate
acquaintance with the amount of excise paid by his brother
philanthropists in British beer. The position of the Government of India
was monstrously unique. If Mr. Batcham were the Government of India, he
would scorn to fill the treasury with the returns of vice. Mr. Batcham
would tax nothing but virtue and the pay of Government servants. And
though Mr. Batcham was not the Government of India, was he not entitled
from his seat in the British House of Commons and the depth of his
righteous indignation, to call the Government of India to account? For
what else then did Jonas Batcham, M. P., one of the largest
manufacturers in the north of England, with little time to spare,
undertake this arduous and expensive journey to the East? Oh, there were
many things that grieved him, Mr. Batcham, many things to which he felt
compelled to take exception, of which he felt compelled to make a note.
He was grieved at the attitude of the Government towards the native
press in the matter of seditious and disloyal editorials, scattered by
thousands under shelter of the vernacular amongst an ignorant and
fanatic population. Mr. Batcham did not wish to see this practice
discouraged. The liberty of the press Mr. Batcham considered the
foundation stone of the liberty of the subject—let the people raise
their voice. Grieved also was Mr. Batcham at the cold shoulder turned by
Government to the Indian Congress—that noble embodiment of the struggles
and aspirations of a subject people. Mr. Batcham thought that all native
movements, movements that marked progress and emancipation, should be
warmly encouraged. The suspicion of intrigue was an absurd one, and this
was not merely a matter of opinion with Mr. Batcham. He had it from a
native gentleman prominently connected with the Congress. Mr. Batcham
had brought a letter of introduction to the native gentleman—Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee—and Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee had given him such
an “inside” view of the methods and aims of the Congress as gratified
Mr. Batcham exceedingly. Mr. Batcham found Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee the
soul of hospitality, very appreciative of Mr. Batcham’s illustrious
position, anxious to gratify Mr. Batcham’s intelligent curiosity by
every means in his power, and brimming over with loyalty and enthusiasm
for the institutions which Mr. Batcham represented. And when Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee declared, in admirably fluent English, that the
Congress was inspired by the single thought of aiding and upholding, so
far as lay in its humble power, the administration of the British
Government—to which every member felt himself personally and
incalculably indebted—Mr. Batcham rejoined audibly, begged Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee to believe that he was proud to be his fellow-subject,
friend, brother, and made a copious note of it.

[Illustration: MR. JONAS BATCHAM, M. P.]

Naturally, under these circumstances, Mr. Batcham would find a very
severe grief in the relations existing between European and native
society here, and naturally he could not find words to express his
indignation at the insolent and indifferent front of his fellow
countrymen towards the people of India. “All,” said Mr. Batcham, “on
account of a brown skin!” He could not understand it—no, he could not
understand it! But if Mr. Batcham could not understand it, he could do
what lay in his power as a person of generous sympathies and high moral
tone to alleviate it, and he threw himself into the task. Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee gave him no invitation which he did not accept, offered him
no opportunity which he did not profit by. He drove with Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee, he accompanied him to the races, to the native theatre, to
the English theatre, to the Kalighat, to the Botanical Gardens, to
various interesting religious and family festivals among Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee’s immediate social circle; also, on occasions upon which
the Brownes made immoderate thanksgiving, he dined with this Indian
gentleman and his emancipated wife, who was allowed to appear in public,
where she smiled a great deal and said nothing whatever. Mrs. Debendra
Lal Banerjee had not been very long emancipated, however, and it was in
complimenting his Indian friend upon having so charming a lady to be his
companion and helpmeet, as Mr. Batcham put it, that he observed the
first and only slight chill—it is impossible for Indian gentlemen to
freeze—in Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee’s responses. If Mr. Batcham could
have known how Mrs. Debendra Lal Banerjee was pinched for that
compliment!

I suppose that the entertainment and education of Mr. Jonas Batcham, M.
P., could hardly have cost Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee less than four or
five hundred rupees when he added it up, but if he had the least desire
to see disaffection and sedition properly encouraged among his
countrymen, or took the smallest satisfaction in the aggravated
annoyance and embarrassment of the Government of India by Her Majesty’s
most loyal Opposition, he must have felt that he had done much to
further these things, and considered the money well invested. Mr. Jonas
Batcham, the incredulous, certainly left his hands so brimful of native
hypothecations that it would have been impossible to lodge another lie
in him anywhere. Urbane, impressively self-satisfied, and well oiled for
work, Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P., being towed homeward down the river
Hooghly, was a sight which must have brought tears of pious thanksgiving
to the eyes of his amiable native friend upon the wharf. Nor was Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee without his private reward. Mr. Batcham, in
departing, clasped him figuratively to his capacious bosom, and told him
movingly that if ever he came to England the Batchams would hasten
collectively to do likewise. Mr. Batcham’s wife and family and friends
would await that event with an impatience which Mr. Banerjee must make
as brief as possible. Nothing would give Mr. Batcham greater pleasure
than to receive Mr. Banerjee in his home and show him over his “works,”
or perhaps—jocularly—to take him to a sitting of the House to hear his
humble servant badger the Secretary of State. And Mr. Banerjee responded
suitably that simply to hear the eloquent addresses of his honourable
friend would be amply sufficient to induce him to undertake the journey,
and that to witness the domestic happiness of this honourable friend
would be only too much joy—he was unworthy. And they parted in mutual
dolours. I anticipate, however, Mr. Batcham is not gone yet.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XVI.


I HAVE not yet mentioned the one matter of all the grievous matters that
came under his observation in India, about which Mr. Batcham was
particularly grieved. So bitterly, so loudly, and so persistently did he
grieve about this, that one might almost have thought he came out for
the purpose, absurd as it may seem. I cannot do better than describe it
in Mr. Batcham’s own terms as “the grinding of the faces of the poor,
through our culpable neglect in failing to provide India with the humane
limitations of a Factories Act.” For years past English labour had been
thus happily conditioned, and who could measure the benefit to the
toiling millions on whose behalf the law had been made! It was
incalculable. As a matter of fact the only result of its operation,
which could be computed with accuracy, was to be found in the out-turn
of the mills. There Mr. Batcham knew to a yard how valuable the
Factories Act was to the operatives; but this was not a view of the
question upon which he dwelt much in India. While he was with us indeed
all practical considerations were swallowed up, for Mr. Batcham, in the
contemplation of the profundity of our iniquity in allowing the
factories of this country pretty much to manage their own affairs. He
did not even permit himself to consider that the enormous product of
Indian looms, together with the cheapness of the cost of production, was
having a prejudicial effect upon the market. He certainly never
mentioned it. His business was with the poor, the down-trodden, the
victims of the rapacity of the capitalist, as much among her Majesty’s
subjects on India’s coral strand as in the crowded tenements of
Manchester or Birmingham. His duty towards these unfortunates was plain,
and heaven forbid that he should think of anything but his duty!

And so Mr. Batcham lamented high and low over the woes of the
unprotected factory “hand” in India. He began his lament as soon as
ever he was informed—though he knew it before—that protection did not
exist; on the face of it, oppression must then be rampant. He himself
was in the trade, he knew the temptations of the capitalist, and he
would not go so far as to say that, if a wise and just law did not
prevent him, the exigencies of the market would never lead him to
be—inconsiderate—toward his _employés_. Reflect then upon the result
of almost unlimited power in the hands of the Indian manufacturer!

This being Mr. Batcham’s pronounced opinion, even before he gave his
personal attention to the subject of Indian manufactures, his
investigations naturally had the effect of heightening it—one might say
they were undertaken with that object. They did not heighten it,
however, as satisfactorily or as definitely as Mr. Batcham could have
wished. After inspecting a cotton factory in Bombay, a woollen factory
in Cawnpore, a jute factory in Calcutta, he found that the notes left
too much to the imagination; and it would be useless to appeal to the
imagination of the House; the House was utterly devoid of it. True, he
had seen hundreds of operatives working in miserable nakedness under the
unpitying eye of a Eurasian overseer; but then it was certainly very
warm, and the overseer had not been sufficiently considerate to kick any
of them in Mr. Batcham’s presence. They certainly began early and worked
late, but then they ate and slumbered in the middle of the day, chewing
betel for casual delectation the rest of the time. Something might
possibly be done with that if he were careful to avoid dwelling upon the
siesta, and he would be sorry to lay stress upon any trifling
amelioration in the condition of these poor wretches. Mr. Batcham
pondered long upon the betel-nut, but saw no salvation there. If it
could be proved that these miserable beings were compelled to resort to
an injurious stimulant to keep their flagging energies up to the
incredible amount of labour required of them—and Mr. Batcham had no
doubt whatever that this was the case—it might be useful to cite the
betel-nut, but there seemed to be a difficulty about proving it. The
only tangible deplorable fact that Mr. Batcham had to go upon, was that
the pay of a full-grown operative, not a woman or a child, but a man,
was represented by the shockingly incredible sum of eight
annas—eightpence!—a day! When he heard this Mr. Batcham thought of the
colossal wages paid to factory hands in England and shuddered. He was so
completely occupied in shuddering over this instance of the rapacity of
the Indian manufacturer, that the statement of what it cost the same
operative to live according to the immemorial custom of his people—about
five shillings a month—entirely escaped his observation. In the stress
of his emotion Mr. Batcham failed to notice one or two other facts that
would have tended to alleviate it, the fact that a factory operative is
paid twice as much as a domestic servant and three times as much as a
cooly, though the cost of life weighs no more heavily upon him than upon
them. The fact that he often works only two or three months of the year
at gunny-bags, and spends the rest of his time in the more leisurely and
congenial scratching of his fields, and above all, the fact that in
India the enterprises of the foreigner accommodate themselves—not of
philanthropy but of necessity—to the customs of the country. It is not
the service of the sahib, with his few thousand personal establishments,
his few hundred plantations and shops, his few dozen factory chimneys
rising along the Hooghly, tainting the sea breeze of Bombay, that can
revolutionise their way of life for two hundred and fifty million people
with whom custom is religion and religion is more than rice. But Mr.
Batcham had no heart to be comforted by such trivialities. He made
emotional notes, dwelt upon the “eight anna daily pittance,” and felt a
still more poignant private grief that there was no cause for louder
sorrow.

At first Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee was inclined to assure his honourable
friend that there was not the slightest need for any beneficent
interference with the condition of his humble compatriots, to praise but
to deprecate Mr. Batcham’s enthusiasm in the matter, and to point out
that the only true and lasting elevation of her Majesty’s most loyal
subjects in India must be brought about through that much maligned and
little understood body, the Indian Congress. But it was a very, very
short time indeed before Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee found himself in full
union with the noble aims of this British benefactor. He had only to
learn—and he learned very quickly—that his sympathy would be
appreciated, to bestow it with all the gushing fulness of which the
Bengali soul is capable, and Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee’s sympathy was
invaluable to Mr. Batcham. It disclosed points of weakness in the Indian
factory system that would otherwise have escaped his observation to this
day, and suggested interpretations which no simple-minded Briton would
have thought of alone. And it divined Mr. Batcham’s dissatisfaction that
he could not be more dissatisfied with remarkable accuracy.

In taking measures—Bengali measures—to secure the sympathy of the
travelling British M. P. with the grand progressive movement of Bengali
patriotism, it is highly advisable to discover as soon as possible
whether he has any little “movement” of his own in contemplation which
might receive a slight impetus with advantage. It is then generally
possible to combine the two, to arrange reciprocal favours, to induce
the globe-trotting potentate to take “broader views.” Mr. Debendra Lal
Banerjee put the whole of his time, and a vocabulary which no English
dictionary could improve, at Mr. Batcham’s disposal, to convince him
that this factory grievance was one of the first which the Indian
Congress would press upon the ear of the Raj, once it had an official
right to make suggestions to that honourable organ. Although Mr.
Banerjee quite agreed with Mr. Batcham that it would be inadvisable to
wait until that happened, he would like Mr. Batcham to understand how
close the interests of the British manufacturer lay to the bosom of the
Indian Congress—though of course Mr. Banerjee designated them as the
wrongs of the native operatives. In the meantime, however, his
honourable friend was naturally restless, naturally desired to lend his
own helping hand to the cause he had at heart. Mr. Banerjee was overcome
by the sublimity of Mr. Batcham’s devotion, and suggested a little
evidence acquired personally. If it were possible for Mr. Batcham to
_converse_ with any of these unfortunate people!

“It’s the terrible disadvantage of not knowing the language!” responded
Mr. Batcham, in a tone which suggested that the language ought to be
supplied to Members of Parliament. “I _have_ conversed with ’em through
another man, but it was very unsatisfactory. Couldn’t get anything
definite. The fact is, Mr. Banerjee, the other man was an Anglo-Indian,
and I’ve no doubt the poor wretches suffered from a sort of unconscious
intimidation!”

Mr. Banerjee shook his head. The head had a black silk hat on it, and
shook as impressively as it might have done in Lombard street or
Westminster. “I fear,” said Mr. Banerjee, “that it is unhappily but too
probable.” Then he raised his eyebrows in a sadly submissive way, took
out his pocket handkerchief and used it in a manner which suggested—very
respectfully—a general deprecation of Anglo-Indians. Mr. Banerjee must
have used it, I think, for this purpose. I doubt whether he is even yet
sufficiently deteriorated by our civilisation to take out his
handkerchief seriously.

“Above all things,” added Mr. Banerjee, thrusting his fat hand into the
breast of his tightly-buttoned frock coat, and wrapping himself up in
the situation, “above all things it is indispensable that your evidence
shall be unbiased in every particular. There is no doubt, I deplore to
tell you, that here in India the poor and the needy amongst us will
sometimes be wrongly influenced by the fear of being deprived of the
staff of life. I have even known cases where, under unjust and
reprehensible intimidation, _perjury_”—Mr. Banerjee’s tone suggested, “I
hardly expected you to believe it!”—“has been committed!”

“Dear me, I dare say,” said Mr. Batcham, “that happens everywhere.”

But Mr. Banerjee had more than sentimental reflections upon the moral
turpitude of his fellow Aryans to contribute to the difficulty of his
honourable friend. He had given his honourable friend’s difficulty the
very fullest attention. He had chased it through the most private
labyrinth of his mind, where he had come into sudden and violent contact
with Ambica Nath Mitter. And in the joyful shock of collision with
Ambica Nath Mitter, Debendra Lal Banerjee had said to himself, “Why
didn’t I think of him before?”

“There is a very intelligent young man in my office,” said Mr. Banerjee,
“who was formerly employed as clerk in a jute mill here. I think he
would most willingly obtain for you any grievances you may require.” Mr.
Banerjee spoke absent-mindedly, reflecting upon the qualifications of
Ambica for the task.

“The statement of them,” corrected Mr. Batcham.

“The statement of them—precisely, yes. Young Mitter has had all
facilities for observing the oppression in the factories, and I have no
doubt it made a deep impression upon his excellent heart. He speaks
English also fairly well. I will send him to you.”

“I should like very much to see Mr. Mitter,” Mr. Batcham remarked.
“Mitter, you said?”

“It will not be necessary to remember his name. Call him ‘Baboo’; he
will answer to plain ‘Baboo.’ I am sure he will remember well about the
oppressions.”

“I should be even better pleased,” said Mr. Batcham, “if he brought two
or three of the oppressed with him.”

“I think he could also do that,” replied Mr. Banerjee without
hesitation.

Then Mr. Banerjee went away and explained Mr. Batcham’s difficulty to
Ambica Nath Mitter. Considering how discreetly Mr. Banerjee explained
it, the sympathetic perception shown by Ambica Nath Mitter was
extraordinary. It might possibly be explained by the fact that they both
spoke Hindustani. At all events, Mr. Banerjee dismissed the young man of
the excellent heart with the comfortable feeling that Mr. Batcham’s
difficulty would be solved quite inexpensively.

Two days after, Ambica presented himself at the residence of the
Brownes, accredited to Mr. Batcham by Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee. Mr.
Browne had gone to office, Mrs. Browne had gone to shop. Mr. Batcham,
ruddy and expansive in the thinnest of flannels, occupied a large
portion of the small veranda alone. The time was most fortuitous, and
Mr. Batcham received Mr. Banerjee’s labour with an agreeable sense of
freedom for the most searching investigations. Having well breakfasted,
digested the morning paper, and fully smoked moreover, Mr. Batcham was
in the mood for the most heartrending revelations.

Ambica was a prepossessing young man, Mr. Batcham thought. His lustrous
long black hair was brushed smoothly back from a forehead that insisted
on its guilelessness. His soft brown eyes were timid but trustful, and
his ambient tissues spread themselves over features of the most
engagingly aquiline character. He was just at the anti-protuberant stage
of baboo-dom, there was no offence in his fatness. He wore spotless
muslin draperies dependent from either shoulder, and his pen behind his
ear. In his rear were three others much like himself, but less savoury,
less lubricated, less comfortable in appearance. They impressed one as
less virtuous too, but this was purely the result of adversity.

Mr. Batcham began by asking “Mr. Mitter” to sit down, which Mr. Mitter
did with alacrity. Never in his life had Mr. Mitter been asked to sit
down by a sahib before. Then Mr. Batcham took out his note-book and
pencil, and said impressively to Mr. Mitter that above all things these
men must understand that they were to tell the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth with regard to the matters upon which he was
about to question them. Then he questioned them.

[Illustration: IN HIS REAR WERE THREE OTHERS MUCH LIKE HIMSELF.]

Perhaps it is unnecessary to go into Mr. Batcham’s questions. They were
put with the fluency and precision of a man of business. Ambica Nath
Mitter understood them perfectly, and explained them admirably. They
elicited exactly what Mr. Batcham wanted to know. His fat, red hand
trembled with avidity as he set down fact after fact of the most
“painful” description—or possibly it was agitated by an indignation
which Mr. Batcham doubtless could not wholly suppress. And, indeed, the
recital of the wrongs which these three miserable men had suffered under
the cruel hand of the tyrannical sirdar,[85] and the indifferent eye of
the callous sahib, would have moved an even less susceptible heart than
that of a British manufacturer in the same line of business. One had
been beaten with stripes—he showed Mr. Batcham the weal on his shoulder,
and Mr. Batcham touched it, for the sake of the dramatic effect of
saying so afterwards. Another had been compelled to work four hours a
day overtime for a week without a pice of extra pay; the third had
humbly begged for a day’s leave to attend the burning of his
grandmother, and when he returned had been abruptly and unjustly
dismissed—the sahib had said he wished to see his face no more. It was
useless to complain; the factory sahibs would cut their wages, and the
other sahibs did not care. They were all poor men; they could not buy
the law. At this point Mr. Batcham grew quite feverish. He unbuttoned
his shirt-collar, and interspersed his notes with interjection-points.
“This is better,” he said to himself—“I mean worse, than I expected.”
The interview took a long time—quite three-quarters of an hour—but Mr.
Batcham was distinctly of the opinion that it had not been misspent. And
when Mr. Batcham closed his note-book, and said to Mr. Mitter that this
was a very sad state of things, but that would do for the present, his
three down-trodden Indian fellow-subjects knelt weeping and kissed the
uppers of Mr. Batcham’s broad British boots, invoking the secular
blessings of heaven upon this “protector of the poor.” Mr. Batcham had
to shuffle his feet under his chair so suddenly that he nearly
dislocated one of his knees. “Don’t!” said he, “pray don’t, not on any
account!” And he raised them with his own hands, very nearly mingled his
tears with theirs, and immediately afterwards made a most dramatic note
of it.

Footnote 85:

  Native manager.

Mr. Batcham had not breakfasted the next morning in fact, he was looking
at his watch and wondering why the Brownes were always so confoundedly
late with their meals when his bearer came up and inquired whether the
sahib would see again the three “admi”[86] he had seen the day before,
they waited below in the compound. Breakfast was still ten minutes off,
and Mr. Batcham said he would go down. He went down, received the men
with affability, and learned through his English-speaking bearer that
they had been the victims of great injustice at the hands of Ambica Nath
Mitter. This one, it seemed, had persuaded them to come to the sahib and
leave work for the day on the promise not only of paying them their
day’s wages, but of making the matter right with the sirdar at the
factory. Instead of which, he had paid them only half a day’s wages, and
when they returned that morning they found themselves dismissed.
Therefore, knowing the heart of the sahib that it was full of mercy,
they had come to cast themselves at his feet. They were all poor men, a
very little would satisfy them—two rupees each perhaps.

Footnote 86:

  Persons.

“That’s six rupees!” said Mr. Batcham seriously, “two rupees each would
keep you for nearly a month in idleness. You can get employment much
sooner than that.” Mr. Batcham knitted his philanthropic brow. “I’ll see
you after breakfast,” he said, as the kitmutgar came to announce it.

The question of his duty in the matter of the six rupees so agitated Mr.
Batcham that he consulted young Browne about it at the breakfast-table,
and that is the reason why it is I, and not Mr. Batcham, who recount his
experience with Ambica Nath Mitter to the public. Young Browne heard his
guest politely and sympathetically through before he ventured to express
an opinion. Even then he deferred it. “I’ll have a look at your
factory-wallahs,” said young Browne. Presently he sent the bearer for
them, who came up with two. The other, he said, had been taken with a
sudden indisposition and had gone away.

Young Browne put up his eye-glass—he sometimes wore an eye-glass, it was
the purest affectation—and looked at the victims of British oppression
in India as they stood with their hands behind them in acute discomfort,
twining and untwining their dusty toes. As he looked, a smile appeared
under the eye-glass, which gradually broadened and broadened until it
knocked the eye-glass out, and young Browne laughed until the tears came
into his eyes. “It’s too good!” said young Browne brokenly. “It’s _too_
good!” and laughed again until Mr. Batcham’s annoyance became serious
and obvious and it was necessary to explain.

“I don’t know what these men may have learned _incidentally_ about
jute,” said he wiping his eyes, “but that’s not their occupation, Mr.
Batcham, I—I happen to know their faces. They’re both umidwallahs in
Watson and Selwyn’s, indigo people, next door to our place.”

“Dear me, are you _sure_?” asked Mr. Batcham with a judicial contraction
of his eyebrows. “What is an umidwallah?”

“Umid means hope—a man of hope. They come and ask to work in the office
as a favour, and don’t get any pay, expecting to be taken on in case of
a vacancy. These scoundrels have been in Watson and Selwyn’s for the
last year. I venture to state they’ve never been inside a jute mill in
their lives.”

[Illustration: THE OTHER HAD BEEN TAKEN WITH A SUDDEN INDISPOSITION AND
HAD GONE AWAY.]

“Tumera kam, k’on hai?”[87] asked young Browne mockingly of one baboo.

Footnote 87:

  Your work, what is it?

The baboo cast down his eyes nervously and said, “Wasson Sewwin company
_kapas, sahib_,”[88] and the other to the same question made the same
answer. They were crushed and sorrowing baboos suffering under a cruel
blow of fate. Why should it have been granted to only one of them to
conclude to be indisposed at the right moment?

Footnote 88:

  With Watson Selwyn Company.

I am afraid the savage Anglo-Indian instinct arose in young Browne and
caused him to tease those baboos a little that morning. It was very
wrong of him doubtless, and then it led to the destruction of a number
of Mr. Batcham’s most interesting notes, which is another regrettable
fact. But the only person who really suffered was Ambica Nath Mitter.
Mr. Batcham, of course, thought it his duty to inform Mr. Debendra Lal
Banerjee of the whole unfortunate affair, and Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee,
in a white heat of indignation, which lasted several days, dismissed
Ambica.

“How could I repose further trust in a man like that!” said Mr. Banerjee
to Mr. Batcham. Besides, privately, Mr. Banerjee thought Ambica
grasping. Mr. Banerjee had entirely intended that out of the five rupees
Ambica received from him, the “factory-wallahs” should be paid in full.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XVII.


SOCIALLY, as I have said, Mr. Batcham represented one of our cold
weather phenomena. They remain phenomena, the globe-trotters,
notwithstanding the regularity of their reappearance, flashing like
November comets across the tranquil Anglo-Indian mind, which refuses to
accustom itself to one class of its heavenly visitors any more than to
the other. It is inaccurate, however, to use any figure of speech which
represents Mr. Batcham as a meteoric body. He had his prescribed
orbit—it is all laid down in Murray—and he circled through it, revolving
regularly upon the axis of an excellent digestion with great gravity of
demeanor. When he appeared upon Calcutta’s horizon, Calcutta could only
put up a helpless eye-glass and writhe wearily until the large red
luminary dipped again in the west. Then for a week it set at nought and
mocked him. Then it unanimously forgot him, and was only reminded of his
unnecessary existence afterward by the acerbity of the _Englishman’s_
comments upon his intelligence, which was entirely deserved.

It was interesting to watch Mr. Batcham in the process of forming an
opinion of Anglo-Indian society; that is, of making his observations
match the rags and tags of ideas about us which he had gathered together
from various popular sources before coming out. They were curious, Mr.
Batcham’s impressions, and they led him into even greater discreetness
of conduct than would naturally be shown by one of the largest
manufacturers of the North of England, of sound evangelical views and
inordinate abdominal development, travelling in search of Truth. In the
doubtful mazes of the flippant Anglo-Indian capital Mr. Batcham felt
that it behoved him to wrap the capacious mantle of his virtue well
about him and to be very heedful of his walk and conversation. He kept a
sharp eye open for invitations to light and foolish behaviour on the
part of possible Mrs. Hawksbees and Mrs. Mallowes whom he met at
Government House, and he saw a great many. When Lady Blebbins asked him
if Mrs. Batcham were with him, Mr. Batcham said to himself, “There is
certainly something behind _that_!” and when Mrs. Walter Luff, who is as
proper as proper can be, proposed to drive him about the Maidan in her
barouche, Mr. Batcham said coyly but firmly that Mrs. Luff must excuse
him for asking, but was her husband to be of the party? Some such
uncompromising front Mr. Batcham showed to temptation in forms even more
insidious than these. I need not say that he never in any case failed to
make a careful note of it; and I have no doubt that long before this
reaches you the glaring facts will have been confided with inculpating
initials to the sympathetic British public through the columns of the
Times over the bashful signature of Jonas Batcham.

Mr. Batcham saw no reason for concealing his preconceived ideas of
Anglo-Indian society from any of the Anglo-Indians he met—our morals
embarrassed him as little as he supposed that they embarrassed us. He
discussed them with us in candid sorrow, he enquired of us about them,
he told us exactly to what extent he considered the deterioration of the
ethical sense amongst us was to be ascribed to the climate. He spoke
calmly and dispassionately about these things, as an indifferent
foreigner might speak about the exchange value of the rupee or the
quality of Peliti’s ices. He seemed to think that as a subject of
conversation we should rather like it, that his investigations would
have a morbid interest for us. It was reported that he approached an
A.-D.-C. in uniform with the tentative remark that he believed Simla was
a very immoral place, and that the A.-D.-C. in uniform made with great
difficulty three wrinkles in his forehead—it is almost impossible for an
A.-D.-C. in uniform to wrinkle himself—and said with calm surprise, “We
are Simla,” subsequently reporting the matter to the Viceroy and
suggesting the bastinado. The story adds that the Viceroy said that
nothing could be done, because an M. P. was certain to go home and tell.
But this is the merest rumour.

Mr. Batcham found the Brownes disappointing in this respect as he found
them disappointing in other respects. They were not extravagant, they
were not in debt, and Mrs. Browne neither swore nor smoked cigarettes
nor rode in steeplechases. Mr. Batcham investigated them until he found
them quite hopelessly proper, when he put them down as the shining and
praiseworthy exception that proves the rule, and restricted his
enquiries to the private life of their neighbours. Thus, driving upon
the Red Road in the evening and encountering a smart young pair in a
cabriolet, Mr. Batcham would demand, “Who is that lady?”

“That’s Mrs. Finsley-Jones,” Mrs. Browne would reply.

“And with whom,” Mr. Batcham would continue severely, “is Mrs.
Finsley-Jones driving?”

“With Mr. Finsley-Jones.”

“Oh—ah! and who is that lady in the straw hat on the grey cob?”

“Mrs. MacDonald, I think.”

“And the gentleman?”

“Her husband.”

“Really! you are quite sure it is her husband, Mrs. Browne. I understood
that in India ladies seldom rode with their husbands.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Batcham,” Helen returned innocently, “horses are
apt to be so skittish in India that it isn’t really safe to go out
without a man, and of course one would rather have one’s husband than
anybody else.”

“Not at all, I assure you, Mrs. Browne. I understand that quite the
opposite opinion prevails among the ladies of Calcutta, and I can depend
upon the source of my information. Now these two people in the dog
cart—they are actually flirting with each other in broad daylight! It is
impossible,” said Mr. Batcham, with an accent of grave deprecation,
“that they can be married.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs,” said Helen shortly, “they were married about the
same time as we were. Why shouldn’t they flirt with each other if they
want to?”

“Certainly not,” said young Browne, who was driving. “It leads to
incorrect ideas of their relations, you see. Fact is, I caught Tubbs
kissing his wife in a dark corner of the Maidan by the Cathedral myself
the other evening, and it was such a very dark corner that if I hadn’t
happened to be lighting a cheroot at the time, I wouldn’t have believed
that Tubbs was Tubbs any more than Mr. Batcham does. Tubbs can’t afford
a popular misapprehension that he isn’t Mrs. Tubbs’s husband. I’ll tell
Tubbs.”

“I think,” said Helen rebukingly, “that you might have taken some other
place to light your cigar in, George.”

“Didn’t light it. Dropped the match, I was so startled. Last match I
had, too. I’ve got that against Tubbs. Oh, I must speak to Tubbs!”

“If you speak to Tubbs,” Mr. Batcham put in prudently, “don’t mention my
name. I am glad to find myself wrong in this case. But Mr. Banerjee
assures me—”

The pony leaped forward under the cut of young Browne’s whip, and Mr.
Batcham very nearly tumbled out of the back seat. Young Browne didn’t
apologise. “Do you mean to say,” said he in a red fury, “that you have
been talking to a beastly baboo about the white women of Calcutta? It—it
isn’t usual.”

It was as much for their own amusement as for their guest’s edification
that the Brownes asked Mr. Sayter to dinner to meet Mr. Batcham. Mr.
Sayter came unsuspectingly, and I have reason to believe that he has not
yet forgiven the Brownes. Nobody in Calcutta could hate a large red
globe-trotter more ferociously than Mr. Sayter did. And the Brownes
failed to palliate their offence by asking anybody else. They were a
square party, and Mr. Batcham sat opposite Mr. Sayter, who went about
afterwards talking about his recent narrow escape from suffocation.

Mr. Batcham welcomed Mr. Sayter as if he had been in his own house or
his own “works.” He shook Mr. Sayter warmly by his slender and frigid
hand and said he was delighted to meet him—it was always a pleasure to
meet representative men, and his young friends had told him that Mr.
Sayter was a very representative man indeed, standing almost at the head
of his department.

“Oh, goodness gracious!” exclaimed Mr. Sayter, sinking into a chair.
“Fancy being talked about like that now.”

“I have a thousand things to ask you,” continued Mr. Batcham with
increasing cordiality, “a thousand questions are surging in my brain at
this very moment. This India of yours is a wonderful place, sir!”

“Well,” said Mr. Sayter, “I suppose I can’t help that. But it isn’t as
wonderful as it used to be—that’s one comfort.”

“I’m afraid,” Mr. Batcham remarked with seriousness, “that your eyes are
blinded. I’ve met numbers of people out here—people of more than average
perception—whose eyes seem to me to be blinded to the beauties of Ind.”

“Probably affected by the dust of Ind,” put in young Browne. “Will you
take my wife in, Mr. Sayter?”

“No,” said Mr. Sayter, “it’s the perverseness of the Anglo-Indian. He
thinks if he talks about the beauties of Ind the Secretary of State will
cut his pay.”

“And yet,” said Mr. Batcham, tucking his napkin into his capacious
waistcoat, “the average public official in this country seems to me to
be pretty fairly remunerated.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Mr. Sayter confidentially, looking up from
his soup, “they’re grossly overpaid. They live in luxury. I am one of
them. I live in luxury. I have a servant to put on my boots. In England
what action should I be obliged to take in regard to my boots? I should
be obliged to put them on myself! And for the misfortune of living in a
country where I get my boots put on, I’m paid twice as much as I would
be in England, and three times as much as I’m worth. Monstrous, isn’t
it?”

Mr. Batcham smiled a benign smile of approbation. “I assure you, sir,
that is not the way the situation has been represented to me thus far. I
hope that before I leave India I may meet other gentlemen who like
yourself have the moral rectitude to rise above mere considerations of
gain—I may say of plunder—and state the case frankly as it is. With
regard to yourself I have no doubt you exaggerate, but I will tell you
candidly that I have myself for some time held the same opinion
precisely with regard to—with regard to—”

“The Indian services generally. Exactly,” responded Mr. Sayter, “and
when you get home you mean to bring it under the consideration of Lord
Kimberley. Quite so. I wouldn’t be too sanguine about popularising your
view among the Europeans out here—the Anglo-Indian is a sordid
person—but all the baboos will be very pleased. You will of course
endeavour to extend the employment of baboos in the higher branches of
the Covenanted service—the judicial and administrative. They come much
cheaper, and their feelings are very deeply hurt at being overlooked in
favour of the alien Englishman. You could get an excellent baboo for any
purpose on earth for thirty rupees a month. And yet,” continued Mr.
Sayter absently, “they pay me two thousand.”

Mr. Batcham looked reflective, and young Browne said, “Cheap and nasty.”

“Oh, dear no!” remarked Mr. Sayter, “A nice fat wholesome baboo who
could write a beautiful hand—probably a graduate of the Calcutta
University. Talking of universities reminds me to add, Mr. Batcham, that
the university baboo is not quite so cheap as he used to be. He is still
very plentiful and very inexpensive, but his price is going up since the
new regulations.”

“Regulations!” said Mr. Batcham. “You people will regulate these
unfortunate natives off the face of the earth.”

“We should love to,” replied Mr. Sayter, “but we can’t. You have no idea
of their rate of multiplication. These particular regulations were a
frightful blow to the baboo.”

“May I ask their nature?” Mr. Batcham inquired.

“Oh yes. They were connected with the examinations for degrees. It was
thought remarkable for some time how universally the baboos passed them,
and how singularly similar the answers were. The charitable put it down
to the extraordinary aptitude of the Bengali for the retention of
printed matter and the known tendency of his mind to run in grooves. The
uncharitable put the other baboos in charge of printing the examination
papers under a mean system of espionage. I regret to say that it was
only too successful; they caught a whole batch of baboos taking the
means of earning an honest living a little prematurely.”

“Then what happened?” asked young Browne. “I haven’t heard this story.”

“I don’t remember whether they suppressed that lot of baboos or not. But
they put an end to the extra edition of examination papers system. They
had the lithographing stone brought into an office where there was only
one man, a European, and they shut the shutters and they locked the
door—oh, they took stringent measures!—and they had the papers turned
off by a coolie, in solemn secrecy, the day before the examination.”

“That must have been entirely satisfactory,” Mr. Batcham remarked.

“It was not. The baboos passed in great numbers that year and sent in
their papers with a smile. Then I believe they stopped up the key-hole
and blindfolded the coolie. It made no difference whatever.”

“How did they find out?” Helen asked.

“In the end they took to watching this simple, ignorant coolie. And they
observed that when he had finished his work he invariably sat down and
rested on the lithographing stone. So that he went away charged, one
might say, with the wisdom of the examiners, and published himself in
the bazar for I daresay four annas a copy.”

“That boy, if he lived in the United States, would rise to be
president,” remarked Mr. Batcham oracularly.

“He was of great assistance to the B.A.’s of that year. Though I believe
they found him rather bony for a satisfactory proof, and they complained
that the sense of the questions was a little disconnected.”

“Mrs. Browne, have you seen anything of the Tootes lately?”

“Nobody has, Mr. Sayter. Mr. Toote has fever.”

“Temperature one hundred and five this morning,” said Mrs. Browne. “The
third attack this year.”

“And the Archie Campbells are going home on sick leave,” added Helen.
“Poor Mr. Campbell is down with abscess of the liver. There’s a great
deal of sickness about.”

“Not more than usual; it’s a deadly time of year,” Mr. Sayter remarked.
“You heard about Bobby Hamilton?”

“Hamilton seedy?” inquired young Browne. “I saw him riding a fine beast
the day before yesterday—he looked fairly fit. Hamilton’s a very knowing
chap about horses, he’s promised to look after a pony for my wife.”

“You’ll have to get somebody else, I’m afraid.”

“Hamilton’s not——”

“Yes. Went to the funeral this morning. Fine chap. Awful pity. Cholera.”

“And Mrs. Hamilton is at home!” exclaimed Helen.

“With another baby. Yes. Four now, Hamilton told me last hot weather.
He’d been seedy, and I was urging him to take furlough.”

“Why didn’t he? It might have saved him,” asked Helen.

“I believe the fourth baby was the reason. He couldn’t afford it. Had to
stay and grill, poor chap.”

“How very distressing,” said Mr. Batcham. “I suppose the widow will be
able to live on her pension?”

“She will receive no pension, sir. Mr. Hamilton belonged to the
Education Department, which is uncovenanted. In the uncovenanted service
it is necessary to live in order to enjoy one’s pension, and that is the
reason why its departments add so little to the taxes.”

“Ah, well,” said Mr. Batcham rather vaguely, “you can’t have your cake
and eat it too. I should consider marriage under those conditions an
improvidence, and I don’t understand people being ill in this climate. I
think it must be largely due to the imagination. So far as _my_
testimony is worth anything, I find myself much benefited by it. Thanks,
Browne, I’ll have Bass. _I’m_ not afraid of it.”

Young Browne smiled and wistfully drank half the unsatisfactory contents
of the long glass by his plate.

“To say nothing,” said he, in mournful reference to the climate, “of the
magnificent thirst it engenders.”

Mr. Sayter joined his hands together at the finger tips and looked at
Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P., from under his eyebrows in a way which was
certainly impertinent, oblivious of the kitmutgar at his elbow who
patiently offered him iced asparagus.

“I’m perfectly certain,” said he, with a crispness in every syllable,
“that Mr. Batcham has been benefited by staying six weeks in India. If
he stayed six years he would doubtless be more benefited still. I
daresay, as he says, we would all be benefited if it were not for our
imaginations. It’s a climate that leaves only one thing to be desired,
and if some people say that’s a coffin, that is clearly their
imagination. Uncovenanted people have a way of dying pretty freely, but
that’s out of sheer perverseness to get more furlough. Most of them go
for ever because they can’t arrange it any other way. And as for
cholera, I give you my word not one man in ten dies of cholera out here;
they go off with typhoid or dysentery, or in some comfortable way like
that, and probably have a punkah the whole time they’re ill.”

The half-past nine gun boomed from the fort, and Mr. Batcham started
nervously. “I don’t know why it is,” said he, “that one doesn’t accustom
one’s self to hearing guns in India. I suppose it is some association
with the Mutiny.”

“Oh, we’ll have another mutiny,” Mr. Sayter remarked; “it’s quite on the
cards. But you must not be alarmed, Mr. Batcham. It won’t be,” he added
irrepressibly, “till after you go home.”

The conversation turned upon light literature, and Mr. Batcham
contributed to it the fact that he understood that man Besant was making
a lot of money. Helen had been reading the memoirs of Mdlle.
Bashkirtseff, and had to say that one half she didn’t understand, and
the other half she didn’t like. “And when,” said Mr. Sayter, “does your
book come out, Mr. Batcham?”

“I haven’t said that I was writing one,” Mr. Batcham replied, smiling
coyly.

“It isn’t necessary,” declared young Browne, “we should expect a book
from you, Mr. Batcham, as a matter of course.”

“Oh, well, I expect I shall have to own to some little account of my
experience,” confessed Mr. Batcham. “My friends have urged me to do
something of the kind. If the illustrations can be got ready, I daresay
it will be out in time to catch the spring market.”

“Don’t forget the illustration of the cobra milking the cow,” said
George Browne, infected by Mr. Sayter; “it will add a great deal to the
interest of the volume without detracting seriously from its
reliability.”

“No,” said Mr. Batcham, “I haven’t got a photograph of that, I’m sorry
to say. The illustrations will be entirely reproduced from photographs.
I’ve got a beauty of the Taj, taken by magnesium light.”

“Have you decided on a title, Mr. Batcham?” Helen inquired, playing with
the orange-blossom in her finger-bowl.

Mr. Batcham looked carefully round him, and observed that the kitmutgars
had left the room. “Don’t mention it,” he said, “because somebody else
may get hold of it, but I think I’ll christen the book either ‘My Trot
Through India,’ or ‘India, Its Past, Present, and Future.’”

“Capital!” exclaimed Mr. Sayter, skipping nimbly to hold back the purdah
for the exit of Mrs. Browne. “You can’t really dispense with either
title, and if I were you I should use them both!”

A little later, before Mr. Sayter disappeared into his brougham,
exploding a vast yawn among the wreaths of his Trichinopoly, Mr. Batcham
shook him warmly by the hand, and re-expressed his gratification at the
opportunity of meeting so representative a gentleman, to whose opinions
such great importance would naturally attach itself. “Joking apart,”
said Mr. Batcham, “the candid statement of your views upon many points
this evening will be very useful to me.”

“I’m so glad!” said Mr. Sayter.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XVIII.


HELEN BROWNE never could be brought to understand that she was not rich
with five hundred rupees a month. Every now and then she reduced the
amount—reduced it indeed, with the rupee at one and twopence!—to pounds,
shillings, and pence, in order to assure herself over again that it was
only a little less than the entire stipend of the Canbury rectory, “and
we all lived upon that,” she would argue, as if she had there somewhat
unanswerable. It was to her a source of continual and lamentable mystery
that they never seemed to find it convenient to open a bank account—it
was so unwise not to have a bank account—and yet there was always what
George Browne called a “negative difficulty,” always something to be
paid first. On the last days of every month when it came to balancing
the accounts and finding nothing over, Mrs. Browne regularly cut the
bawarchi six pice on general principles, for which he as regularly came
prepared. Kali Bagh cooked nothing better than his accounts. Besides
this she had her evening gloves cleaned, and saved the price of a ticca
dhurzie, which is at least eight annas, every Saturday by doing the
family darning, and this, in a memsahib, is saintly. Certainly the
Brownes were not extravagant. Helen used to maintain that the remarkable
part of it was vegetables being so cheap, but there was probably more
force in her reflection that it didn’t really matter much about getting
a cauliflower for a penny when one’s ticca gharries came to three
pounds. It was much more curious to observe how exactly every month the
Brownes’ expenses met their income with perhaps just a trifle now and
then to spare, which they might put away if they liked, unreceipted, to
be a nest-egg for a comfortable debt in the near future—the fact being
that Kasi and Kali Bagh and the rest knew the sahib’s _tulub_ as well as
they knew their own, and were all good at arithmetic to the splitting of
a pi. It is perhaps a tribute to the perfection of their skill that they
never disturbed Helen’s idea that she was very well off. When the rupees
disappeared more quickly than usual, she thought of the price of
vegetables and was convinced that retrenchments were possible and should
soon be effected. Next month Kasi would permit himself to forget various
trifling bills, and there would be great prosperity with the Brownes for
a fortnight. But invariably there came a time of reckoning when Kasi
demonstrated that the income was very nearly equal to the outgo. On the
whole Kasi was contented with the sahib’s present pay, having great
faith in his prospects of promotion. Barring accidents, Kasi’s
speculations upon the financial future of the Brownes were very
perfectly adjusted.

It was the elusive bank account that induced them to listen to the Jack
Lovitts, who lived in Park-street in a bigger house than they could
afford. “We can perfectly well let you have the top flat,” said Mrs.
Jack Lovitt at the end of the cold weather, “and it will be that much
off our rent besides being a lot cheaper for you. You see we could
divide the mallie and the sweeper,” said Mrs. Lovitt, enunciating this
horror quite callously, “and that would be an advantage. Then we might
have one leg of mutton between us, you know, and that sort of thing—save
a lot of bazar.”

“But should you like to have somebody living over your head?” asked
Helen, pondering over the idea.

“Of course not,” replied Mrs. Lovitt candidly, “who would? But if we
mean to go on leave next year we’ve got to do something. Jack’s eight
hundred simply vanishes in our hands. Last month, Helen Browne, our bill
from Peliti alone was a hundred and ten—beast! If Jack wouldn’t insist
on giving ice to his polo ponies I think we might get on. But you can’t
reason with him about it. He’ll come home with a broken neck from that
polo one of these days. And we haven’t earned anything approaching a
decent pension yet, and my complexion’s absolutely gone,” added this
vivacious lady, who liked saying these insincere things to her “young
friend Mrs. Browne,” who began at this time to be amused by them.

“I’ve done my little uttermost,” Mrs. Lovitt continued. “This nougat is
filthy, isn’t it? I’ll never leave my dear Peliti again!” The ladies
were tiffining together in a luxury of solitude. “I’ve sold three
frocks.”

“No!” said Helen. “Which?”

“That vieux rose brocade that I got out from home for the
Drawing-Room—the more fool I!—and that gray shimmery crêpe that you
like; and another, a mouse-coloured sort of thing, with gold bands, that
I don’t think you know—I’ve never had it on. Frifri sent it home with a
bill for a hundred and fifty if you please—and I gave her the
foundation. However, I’ve been paid for it, and Frifri hasn’t, and she
can jolly well wait!”

“What did you get for it?” asked Helen.

“Eighty-five—wasn’t I lucky? That new little Mrs. Niblit—jute or indigo
or something—heaps of money. Lady Blebbins bought the other two for
Julia. She’s up in Allahabad, you know, where the fact of my having
swaggered around in them all season won’t make any difference. What a
pretty little flannel blouse that is of yours, my dear—I wish I could
afford one like it!”

“It cost three eight altogether,” said Mrs. Browne, “the dhurzie made it
last week. He took two days, but I think he dawdled.”

“Three eight’s a good deal, I think, for a blouse,” returned Mrs.
Lovitt, the experienced. “Dear me, what a horrible thing it is to be
poor! And nothing but boxes in that upper flat! Three rooms and two
bath-rooms, going, going, gone—I wish it were! What do you say, Mrs.
Browne? Ninety-five rupees only!”

“It’s cheap,” said Helen; “I’ll ask George.”

She did ask George, at the shortest possible intervals for three days,
and when the subject had been allowed to drop for a quarter of an hour
George asked her. It became the supreme question, and the consideration
they devoted to it might have revised the Permanent Settlement or
decided our right to occupy the Pamirs.

There were more pros and cons than I have patience to go into, and I
daresay they would have been discussing it still, if Mrs. Browne had not
thought fit to decline her breakfast on the morning of the third day.
Whereat young Browne suspected fever—he hoped not typhoid—but the place
certainly smelt feverish, now that he came to smell it—and there was no
doubt that it would be an economy to take Mrs. Lovitt’s flat, and
forthwith they took it.

Moving house in India is a light affliction and but for a moment. The
sahib summoned Kasi, and announced to him that the change would be made
to-morrow, “and in thy hand all things will be.” Kasi received
particulars of the address in Park-street, salaamed, saying “Very good,”
and went away more sorrowful than he seemed, for he was comfortable and
mighty where he was, and change was not often a good thing. Besides, he
knew Lovitt sahib that he had a violent temper and reprehensible modes
of speech—it might not be good to come often under the eye of Lovitt
sahib. And he would be obliged to tell the mallie his friend that it
would be to depart, which would split his heart in two. However, it was
the sahib’s will and there was nothing to say, but a great deal to do.
Moreover, there might be backsheesh, which alleviated all things.

Next morning the Brownes found themselves allowed one table and two
chairs for breakfast purposes, and six coolies sat without, dusty and
expectorant, waiting for those. Kasi, at the gate, directed a departing
train, each balancing some portion of their worldly goods upon his head,
Kasi, watchful and stern, the protector of his master’s property. The
dining-room was dismantled, the drawing-room had become a floor space
enclosed by high white walls with nail marks in them. There was a little
heap of torn paper in one corner, and cobwebs seemed to have been spun
in the night in half the windows.

“It’s pure magic!” Helen exclaimed. “It’s to-day week, and I’ve been
asleep,” and then “We’ve been awfully happy here, George,”—an illogical
statement to accompany wet eyelashes.

Even while they sat on their single chairs at their single table, which
George put his elbows on, to secure it he said, the bedroom furniture
decamped with many footsteps, and after the meal was over there was
nothing left to testify of them but their hats laid conspicuously on a
sheet of paper in the middle of the drawing-room floor. “I suppose,”
said young Browne, “they think we’ve got brains enough to carry those
over ourselves.”

[Illustration: THEIR HATS LAID CONSPICUOUSLY ON A SHEET OF PAPER.]

Mrs. Browne put hers on and drove her husband to office. Then she
shopped for an hour or two, and finished up by coming to tiffin with me.
Then she repaired to Park-street, where she found herself established in
the main, with Kasi still superintending, his locks escaping from his
turban, in a state of extreme perspiration. Then she made a dainty
afternoon toilet with great comfort, and by the time young Browne came
home to tea it was quite ready for him in every respect, even to the
wife behind the teapot, in circumstances which, except for the pictures
and the bric-a-brac, might be described as normal. And of course, being
an insensate sahib, he congratulated his wife—it was prodigious, and all
her doing! Kasi was also commended, however, and the praise of his
master fell pleasantly on the ear of Kasi, who immediately added another
rupee to the amount he meant to charge for coolie-hire. Thus is life
alleviated in India; thus do all its material cares devolve into a
hundred brown hands and leave us free for our exalted occupations or our
noble pleasure. We are unencumbered by the consideration of so much as a
button. Under these beatitudes the average Anglo-Indian career ought to
be one of pure spirit and intellect, but it is not so—not singularly so.

“What we must be thoroughly on our guard against,” said young Browne in
the top flat at his second cup, “is seeing too much of the Lovitts.
They’re not a bad sort if you keep them at a proper distance; I don’t
believe for an instant there’s any harm in little Mrs. Jack; but it
won’t do to be too intimate. They’ll be as troublesome as sparrows if we
are.”

“There’s one thing we’ll have to look out for,” said Mr. Jack Lovitt in
the bottom flat at his third muffin, “and that is being too chummy with
the Brownes; they’re all right so long as they stay upstairs, but we
won’t encourage them to come down too often. We’ll have Mrs. B. gushing
all over the place if we do. They’ll have to understand they’ve only
rented the top flat.”

“They’ll always know what we have for dinner,” remarked the spouse in
the top flat.

“They’ll see every soul that comes to the house,” said the spouse in the
bottom flat.

“It isn’t the slightest concern of theirs,” replied the lord upstairs.

“It’s absolutely none of their business,” returned the lord downstairs.

And they were both “blowed” if they would tolerate the slightest
interest in their respective affairs. The Brownes concluded that
“perhaps once a month” would be often enough to ask the Lovitts to come
up and dine, and the Lovitts thought the Brownes might come in to tea
“once in three weeks or so.” Before this they had been in the habit of
entertaining each other rather oftener, but then they were not under the
same roof, with a supreme reason for establishing distance. Mrs. Browne
believed that on the whole she wouldn’t engage Mrs. Lovitt’s dhurzie—it
might lead to complications; and Mrs. Lovitt fancied she had better not
offer Helen that skirt-pattern—it would necessitate endless discussions
and runnings up and down. Mrs. Lovitt deliberately arranged to go up to
see Helen for the first time with her hat and gloves on, to make it
obvious that the call should be formally returned. Helen sent down a
note, beautifully written and addressed, to ask Mrs. Lovitt to come to
tea on Wednesday afternoon, at a quarter past five. The ladies left no
little thing undone, in fact, that would help to quell a tendency to
effusion; they arranged to live as remotely from each other as the
limits of No. 61, Park-street, permitted. The Brownes had always the
roof and habitually sent chairs up there. “They can’t say we haven’t
rented it,” said Helen.

Their precautions not to be offensive to each other were still more
elaborate. Mr. Browne ascertained at what time Mr. Lovitt went to
office, and made a habit of starting a quarter of an hour earlier. Mrs.
Lovitt, observing that the Brownes were fond of walking in the compound
in the evening, walked there always in the morning. Neither of them
would give any orders to the mallie, whom they jointly paid, for fear of
committing an unwarrantable interference, and that functionary grew fat
and lazy, while the weeds multiplied in the gravel walks. Helen even
went so far as to use the back staircase to avoid a possible encounter
at the front door, but young Browne disapproved of this. He believed in
abating no jot or tittle of their lawful claims. “Use the staircase
freely, my dear,” said he, “but do not engage in conversation at the
foot of it.”

They assumed a bland ignorance of each other’s affairs, more discreet
than veracious. When Mrs. Lovitt mentioned that they had had a lot of
people to dinner the night before, Helen said, “_Had_ you?” as if she
had not heard at least half a dozen carriages drive up at dinner time;
as if she had not decided, she and George, indifferent upon the roof,
that the trap which drove off so _much_ later than the others must have
been Jimmy Forbes’s. And they would be as much surprised, these two
ladies, at meeting anywhere else at dinner as if they had not seen each
other’s name inscribed in the peon book that brought the invitations,
and remarked each of the other, at the time, “It seems to me we see
enough of those people at home.”

They were a little ridiculous, but on the whole they were very wise
indeed, and the relations that ensued were as polite and as amiable as
possible. It was like living on the edge of a volcano, taking the
precaution of throwing a pail or two of water down every day or two. And
nothing happened.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XIX.


NOTHING happened. Thus for three months, three hot weather months. The
punkah wallahs came and ministered to the sahiblok with creakings and
snorings that cannot be uttered, much less spelled. The mango-crop was
gathered and sold, the _topsy muchies_ swam up the river Hooghly, and
were caught and cooked in their appointed season. The Viceroy and his
shining ones went to Simla, and a wave of flirtation swept over the
Himalayas. The shops put up grass-tatties for the wind to blow through,
and the customers who went in were much cooler than the coolies who
stood outside throwing water over them. The brain-fever bird spoke—he
does not sing—all day long in the banyan-tree—“_Ponk! Ponk!_” all day
long in the thickest part of the banyan-tree, where nobody can see or
shoot him. He comes and stays with the hot weather, a feathered thing
accursed. The morning paper devoted itself exclusively to publishing the
“Gazette” notices of leave and the lists of intending passengers by P.
and O., and week after week the tide bore great ships outward, every
cabin occupied by persons connected with more or less disordered livers,
going home for three or six or twelve months’ repairs. You could count
on your fingers the people you knew in the Red Road. Kasi asked for an
umbrella; respectfully as a right, it was the _dustur_ for the sahib to
provide an umbrella. The ayah begged for an umbrella, humbly as a
favour; she had far to come and the sun was “_ag kamofik_.”[89] The
kitmutgar asked for an umbrella, not because he had the slightest idea
that he would get it, but because it was generally more blessed to ask
than not to ask. The cholera arrived punctually, and increased the
native death-rate, with its customary industry. The Lovitts lost a
bearer from this cause, and a valuable polo pony from heat apoplexy. The
latter bereavement was in the paper. The oil exuded more profusely still
upon the adipose tissue that encloses the soul of a baboo, and Calcutta
flamed with the red flowers of the gold mohur tree, panting nightly,
when they were all put out, under the cool south wind from the sea.

Footnote 89:

  Like fire.

Neither the Lovitts nor the Brownes left Calcutta; they were among the
people you counted on your fingers. There is very little to talk about
in the hot weather, and the fact that nothing had happened was discussed
a good deal, in the dead privacy of the roof or the lower veranda. Both
the top flat and the bottom flat thought it had managed admirably, and
congratulated itself accordingly. That nothing should have happened
caused them to rise considerably in each other’s esteem—there were so
few people living under one roof in Calcutta who were able to say it.
They told society how agreeable they found it to live with each other,
and society repeated it, so that the Brownes heard of the Lovitts’
satisfaction, and the Lovitts heard of the Brownes’. Indeed, there came
a time when the Brownes and the Lovitts thought almost as much of each
other as they did before they lived together.

It had been an extinct volcano after all, and they stopped throwing
water down. Mrs. Lovitt, by degrees, became easily confidential again,
and told Helen among other things that edified her, exactly what they
were saying at the club about Mrs. Lushington and the General’s
A.-D.-C., Mrs. Lovitt’s version coming straight from Jimmy Forbes, and
being absolutely correct. Helen being without a confidential male
admirer upon these matters—husbands kept them notoriously to
themselves—had not the wherewithal to exchange; but she borrowed the
Lovitts’ khansamah to make some cocoanut creams, which was going a great
deal further. When the Brownes’ pony was laid up with the sun,
threatening vertigo, Jack Lovitt took young Browne to office very
sociably in his cart; and when the Lovitts ran up to Darjiling on ten
days’ casual leave, the Brownes looked after “the littlest black and tan
in Calcutta,” and took it out for a drive every day. They dined and
lunched and shopped more and more often together, and Mrs. Lovitt knew
exactly how many _topsy muchies_ Mrs. Browne got for eight annas.

It was just at this very favourable point that the difficulty about Mr.
Lovitt’s unmarried sister arose. Mr. Lovitt’s unmarried sister had been
shipped six months before to an up-country relation, and having made no
use whatever of her time in Cawnpore, was now to be transferred to
Calcutta as a final experiment. Mrs. Lovitt wanted a room for her
unmarried sister-in-law, wanted Helen’s dining-room. It was a serious
difficulty, and the Lovitts and the Brownes in the plenitude of their
confidence and good-will agreed to surmount it by “chumming,”—living
together and dividing the bulk of the household expenses—a form of
existence largely supported in Calcutta.

In the beginning, chumming lends itself vastly to expansion, and the
Brownes and the Lovitts expanded to the utmost verge. They forgot the
happy result of past discretions; they became a united family, no longer
a top and a bottom flat. They pooled their domestic resources—the
soup-plates were Mrs. Lovitt’s, the dessert-knives were Mrs. Browne’s.
They consulted each other’s tastes pressingly. They had brisket always
on Saturday night because “Jack” liked cold brisket for breakfast on
Sunday morning, and mutton twice a week because young Browne had a
weakness for caper sauce. Mrs. Lovitt sent away her cook—a crowning act
of grace—and Kali Bagh reigned in his stead. It was all peace and
fraternity, and the sahibs sat together in long praise of each other’s
cigars every evening, while the memsahibs upstairs discussed their
mutual friends and sank deeper into each other’s affections. Indeed, in
little Mrs. Lovitt’s Helen had absolutely no rival except Jimmy Forbes,
the black and tan, and Mr. Lovitt.

They saw a good deal of Mr. Forbes naturally, and the interesting and
unique position in the house occupied by that gentleman was revealed to
Helen with all the force of an Anglo-Indian experience. He was nearly
always there, and when he hadn’t been there he was in the habit of
giving an account of himself as having been elsewhere. It was expected
of him, and much beside. Helen decided that he couldn’t be described as
a “tame cat” in the family, because the position of a tame cat is an
irresponsible one, and Mr. Forbes had many responsibilities. If Mrs.
Lovitt’s racquet went “_fut_”[90] it was Jimmy who had it re-strung for
her. When a new theatrical company came sailing up from Ceylon, Jimmy
went on its opening night to report, and if it were good enough to waste
an evening on, he took the Lovitts—generally both of them—later. If the
roof leaked, or the servants misbehaved, Mrs. Lovitt complained to Jimmy
quite as often as to Jack, and Jimmy saw to it. When Mrs. Lovitt wanted
some Burmese carvings, Jimmy arranged it at the jail, where the captive
Burmese carve, and when that lady decided that she would like to sell
her victoria and buy a cabriolet, Jimmy advertised it in _The
Englishman_ and made the bargain. In fact Mr. Forbes relieved Mr. Lovitt
of more than half the duties pertaining to his official position, of
which kindness the latter gentleman was not insensible. Nor could
anybody say that little Mrs. Lovitt was. She nursed Jimmy Forbes when he
was ill, scolded him when he was imprudent, and advised him on the
subject of his clothes. I don’t know that she ever put his necktie
straight, but she never would allow him to wear anything but blue ones,
and made a point of his throwing away all his high collars—the turned
down ones suited him so much better. She did not overload him with
benefits, but at Christmas and on his birthday she always gave him some
little thing with a personal association, a pair of slippers, some
initialled handkerchiefs, a new photograph of herself, generally taken
with the littlest black and tan in Calcutta.

Footnote 90:

  To ruin.

Thus they made no secret of their affection; it had the candour of high
noon. They called each other Jimmy and Jennie with all publicity. When
Jimmy went home on three months’ leave, Jennie told all her friends that
she was simply desolated. She declared to Jimmy and to the world that
she was a mother to this young man, and no mother could have walked and
danced and driven more self-sacrificingly with her son. Mrs. Lovitt was
at least three years younger than her “Jimmy-boy,” but that, in cases of
adoption, is known to be immaterial. In periods of absence they wrote to
each other regularly twice a week, and Jimmy never forgot to send kind
regards to Jack. Their manner to each other was conspicuous for the
absence of anything foolish or awkward or constrained—it was above
embarrassment, it spoke of a secure footing and an untroubled mind, Mrs.
Lovitt lectured Mr. Forbes, and Mr. Forbes rebuked Mrs. Lovitt with a
simplicity and good humour that produced a kind of astonishment in the
spectator, who looked about her in vain for a formula of criticism.
“No,” Mr. Forbes would say, “you’d better not call on Mrs. Lushington.
It’s all right for me to go, of course, but I’d rather you didn’t know
her.” And Mrs. Lovitt would poutingly acquiesce. When Tertium Quiddism
takes this form, what is there to say?

Mrs. Lovitt’s official lord, at all events, found very little to say. He
liked Forbes himself extremely—capital fellow—awfully clever chap—and
admitted him into full communion as a member of the family in good and
regular standing, with a placidity which many husbands doubtless envied
him. The gentlemen were not brothers or even brothers-in-law, the
relation was one too delicately adjusted to come under any commonly
recognised description; but there was a kind of fraternity in it which
Mrs. Lovitt seemed to establish, with tacit limitations which
established themselves. The limitations were concerned with
impropriety—in the general sense. It is certain that there were no
occasions _a deux_ when Mr. Forbes felt out of it with Mr. and Mrs.
Lovitt—they had no privacy to speak of which Jimmy was not welcome to
share. In family matters Mr. Lovitt treated Mr. Forbes much as a valued
Under-Secretary. The two men were calling upon me one Sunday, and I
inquired of Mr. Lovitt whether his wife were going to Mrs. Walter Luff’s
concert for the East Indian Self-Help Association. “’Pon my word,” he
said, “I don’t know. Forbes will tell you.” Mrs. Lovitt had frequent
occasion to mention these amicable conditions to her friends. “My
husband thinks the world of Jimmy Forbes,” she often said, “and Jimmy is
perfectly devoted to him.” In moments of intimacy after tiffin with Mrs.
Browne, she was fond of comparing the two. “Jimmy is a good deal the
cleverer,” she would say judicially, “but Jack is much the better
tempered, poor dear, and his looks leave _nothing_ to be desired, in my
opinion. But then I always did spoil Jack.”

When Miss Josephine Lovitt arrived, tall and vigorous, with a complexion
fresh from the school-room, full of bubbling laughter, and already made
fully aware of herself by six months’ diligent spurning of nice little
subalterns, who thought her a Juno of tremendously good form, these
ladies had further confidences. Mrs. Lovitt initiated them by asking
Helen if she didn’t think it would be just the thing for Jimmy, and in
the discussion which followed it appeared that Mrs. Lovitt had often
tried to marry Jimmy off—she was sure he would be much happier
married—but hitherto unavailingly. No one knew the trouble she had
taken, the efforts she had made. Mrs. Lovitt couldn’t understand it, for
it was only a matter of picking and choosing, and Jimmy wasn’t shy.
“I’ve argued it out with him a score of times,” she said, “but I can’t
get the least satisfaction. Men are queer animals.”

Helen agreed that Mr. Forbes ought to be married. It was so much her
opinion that she had to be careful not to argue too emphatically. It
seemed to Mrs. Browne that there were particular as well as general
grounds for approving such an idea, and Miss Josephine Lovitt struck her
also as its brilliant apotheosis. “Josie’s a nice girl,” declared Mrs.
Lovitt, “and a great deal cleverer than she pretends to be. And Jack
would like it above all things. But it’s too nice to hope for,” and Mrs.
Lovitt sighed with the resignation that is born of hope deferred.

Helen reported the matter duly to George, who laughed in a ribald manner
about Mrs. Lovitt’s intentions, and would hear nothing of the
advisability of the match, as men never will. So she was not encouraged
to suggest anything of co-operation on her own part. Indeed, she was
hardly conscious of such an idea, but the married woman’s instinct was
already awake in her, and she was quite prepared to do anything she
could to further Mrs. Lovitt’s benevolent design. It should be
furthered, Helen thought, in the interests of the normal and the
orthodox.

Opportunities did not immediately occur, because Mrs. Lovitt took them
all herself. She gave tennis parties at the Saturday club, and made up
sets so that Mr. Forbes and Miss Lovitt played together. When Mr. Forbes
sang “The Bogie Man” to them all after dinner she made Josephine play
his accompaniment to save her “rheumatic” finger-joints. Josephine might
teach Jimmy “Halma”—she was much too stupid to learn—she would talk to
Mr. Browne. All this quite shamelessly, rather with an air of conscious
rectitude, of child-like _naïveté_. It was the old thing, Jimmy Forbes
thought, over his peaceful private cigar; it amused her to do it, it
always had amused her to do it. Before he had generally resented it a
good deal; this time he resented it too, by Jove, but not so much. After
all, why should he resent it—deuced bad policy; it only encouraged the
little woman to go on with this sort of game. And for the first time in
Mr. Forbes’s dawning experience of womankind it occurred to him that it
might be advisable under some circumstances not to sulk. He wouldn’t
sulk—he would teach the little woman a lesson. It wouldn’t be a bad
thing to do. Besides, Miss Lovitt was rather amusing, and no fool
either; she wouldn’t misunderstand things. And Mr. Forbes finished his
cigar with the conviction that such an experiment would be absolutely
safe so far as the girl was concerned—of course, he was bound to think
of the girl—and more or less agreeable.

[Illustration: JOSEPHINE MIGHT TEACH JIMMY “HALMA.”]

A little later Helen confided to George that she really wouldn’t be one
bit surprised if something came of it; Jack Lovitt remarked to his wife
that Forbes seemed rather taken with Josie, and he was quite prepared to
give them his blessing; and Mrs. Lovitt replied that it _would_ be
lovely, wouldn’t it, but she was afraid it was only temporary, adding
rather vaguely that Jimmy Forbes wasn’t a bit like other men. On the
whole it wouldn’t be unsuitable, but it was a pity Josie was so tall—she
overtopped him by about a foot—a tall woman and a little man did look so
idiotic together. That evening Mrs. Lovitt accompanied “The Bogie Man”
without any reference to her rheumatic finger-joints.

It was at this juncture—when any lady of discretion living in the same
house would have been looking on in silent joy, without lifting a
finger—that Helen found herself yielding to the temptation of furthering
matters, so successfully, you understand, was Mr. Forbes making his
experiment. Here a little and there a little Mrs. Browne permitted
herself to do what she could, and opportunities occurred to an extent
which inspired and delighted her. She discovered herself to be a person
of wonderful tact, and the discovery no doubt stimulated her, though it
must be said that circumstances put themselves very readily at her
disposal. Mrs. Lovitt, for one thing, had gradually retired from the
generalship of the situation, becoming less and less sanguine of its
issue as Helen became more and more hopeful. She even had a little
confidential conversation with Josephine, in which she told that young
lady that though Jimmy was a dear good fellow and she had always been
able to depend upon him to be kind to any friends of hers, she was
afraid he was not a person to be taken altogether _seriously_. Josie
would understand. And Josie did understand quite well.

As to Mr. Forbes himself, his experiment had succeeded. There was no
doubt whatever that the little woman had been taught a lesson; anyone
could see that she had learnt it remarkably well. Yet he continued to
instruct her, he did not withdraw the experiment. He found it
interesting, and not exclusively in its effect upon Mrs. Lovitt. Miss
Josephine found it interesting too. She thought she would like to hand
Mr. Forbes back to her little sister-in-law, to hand him back a little
damaged, perhaps. This was doubtless very naughty of Miss Josephine, but
not unnatural under the circumstances. It was only, after all, that she
did not make a good cat’s paw.

And thus it went on, to be brief—for this is not a chronicle of the
affair of Jimmy Forbes and Mrs. Lovitt’s sister-in-law, the which any
gossip of Calcutta will give you at great length and detail—until the
Brownes asked Miss Josephine Lovitt and Mr. Forbes to go with them to
see Mr. Wylde de Vinton, assisted by a scratch company, perform _Hamlet_
in the opera house, on a Saturday evening. Hitherto Mr. Forbes’s
Saturday evenings had not been his own, they had been Mrs. Lovitt’s. She
had established a peculiar claim to be amused on Saturday evenings—they
were usually consecrated to long talks of a semi-sentimental order,
which Jack Lovitt could not possibly have understood even if he had been
there. Therefore when Mr. Forbes showed Mrs. Lovitt Helen’s note and
stated his intention of accepting, it was in the nature of a finality.

[Illustration: MISS JOSEPHINE LOVITT REFRAINED FROM HANDING HIM BACK TO
MRS. LOVITT.]

I am not interested in deciding whether it was from purely conscientious
motives that Miss Josephine Lovitt, having discovered Mr. Forbes to have
sustained considerable damage, refrained from handing him back to Mrs.
Lovitt. All I wish to establish is that the Brownes did not leave No.
61, Park-street until quite three weeks after the engagement was
announced. Mrs. Lovitt was obliged to wait until they found a house. And
of course their going had nothing whatever to do with dear Josie’s
engagement—Mrs. Lovitt made that match, and was very proud of it. The
incident that brought about their misunderstanding with the Brownes was
the merest trifle, Mrs. Lovitt would tell you if you knew her well
enough, the merest trifle. They, the Lovitts, had asked the Honourable
Mr. Justice Lamb of the High Court to dinner on, say, Friday of next
week. His lordship was suffering very much from the weather when the
invitation came, and declined it, fabricating another engagement as even
their lordships will. Mrs. Browne and Mrs. Lovitt had then reached that
point in the development of the chumming system—hastened a little by
circumstances—when one thinks it isn’t absolutely necessary for those
people to concern themselves in _all_ one’s affairs, and the
circumstance was not mentioned. As it happened, therefore, the Brownes
two days later invited Mr. Justice Lamb to dinner on the same Friday,
the old gentleman being a second cousin of young Browne’s, and in the
habit of dining with them once in six months or so. The thermometer
having gone down a few degrees, his lordship, who was a person of absent
mind, accepted with much pleasure, putting the note in his pocket-book
so that he wouldn’t forget the youngster’s address.

“We have a man coming to dinner to-night,” Helen remarked casually at
breakfast, and Mrs. Lovitt was of course not sufficiently interested to
inquire who it was, if Mrs. Browne didn’t choose to say. The man came,
ate his dinner with a good conscience and a better appetite, and being
as amiable as he was forgetful, mentioned particularly to Mrs. Lovitt
how sorry he was not to have been able to accept her kind invitation of
last week.

It was a little thing, but Mrs. Lovitt foresaw that it might lead to
complications. And so the Brownes departed from No. 61, Park-street, not
without thanksgiving.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XX.


FOR the furtherance of a good understanding between the sahibs and the
Aryans who obey them and minister unto them, the Raj[91] has ordained
language examinations. This was necessary, because in war,
contract-making, or the management of accounts, neither a Ghurka nor a
Bengali will comprehend you if you simply swear at him. He must be
approached through a rudimentary medium of imperative moods and future
tenses. Therefore the institution of the Higher and the Lower Standard,
and much anguish on the part of Her Majesty’s subalterns. The Raj
attaches rather more credit to the former of these examinations, but
afterwards the difference is nominal—you forget them with equal
facility.

Footnote 91:

  Government.

It might be respectively pointed out, however, that the Government of
India has done nothing in this direction to stimulate intercourse with
the native population among memsahibs. In fact the Government of India
does not recognise memsahibs in any way that is not strictly and
entirely polite. And so the memsahib “picks up” Hindustani—picks it up
in her own simple artless fashion which dispenses with all ordinary aids
to the acquirement of a foreign tongue. She gathers together her own
vocabulary, gathers it from the east and the west, and the north and the
south, from Bengal and Bombay, from Madras and the Punjab, a preposition
from Persia, a conjunction from Cashmere, a noun from the Nilgherries.
She makes her own rules, and all the natives she knows are governed by
them—nothing from a grammatical point of view could be more satisfactory
than that. Her constructions in the language are such as she pleases to
place upon it; thus it is impossible that she should make mistakes.

The memsahib’s Hindustani is nevertheless not perfectly pure, entirely
apart from questions of pronunciation, which she regulates somewhat
imperiously. This is because she prefers to improve it by the admixture
of a little English; and the effect upon the native mind is quite the
same. It really doesn’t matter whether you say, “That’s _bote atcha hai
khansamah-gee_,”[92] or “This is very _carab_,[93] you stupid
_ool-ka-beta_,”[94] or use the simple Hindustani statements to express
your feelings. The English may adorn them, but it is the Hindustani
after all that gives vitality to your remarks. “_Chokee lao_,” means
“bring a chair,” but if you put it, “bring me a _chokee lao_,” the
meaning of the command is not seriously interfered with, beside
convincing you more firmly that you have said what you wanted to say. I
suppose Mrs. Browne talked more Hindustani to Kali Bagh than to anybody
else, and one dinner’s dialogue, so to speak, might be like this:

Footnote 92:

  Very good, worthy Khansamah.

Footnote 93:

  Bad.

Footnote 94:

  Son of an owl.

“_Kul ka_[95] mutton, how much is there, Kali Bagh?”

Footnote 95:

   Of yesterday.

“_Ha, bus hai, hazur._”[96]

Footnote 96:

   Yes, there is enough, your honour.

“Then you may _irony-stew do_,[97] and undercut beefsteak _muncta_,[98]
and mind you find an _atcha wallah_.[99] Onions fry _ka sat,
sumja_?”[100]

Footnote 97:

   Give an Irish stew.

Footnote 98:

   I want.

Footnote 99:

   Good one.

Footnote 100:

   Therewith, do you understand?

“_Ha, hazur! Bote atcha wallah miliga.[101] Ecpuddin kawasti?_”[102]

Footnote 101:

  I will find.

Footnote 102:

  And for pudding?

“Oh, you can plum-pudding, _do_—a _chota wallah_, and _cabadar bote_
plenty _kismiss_”[103]

Footnote 103:

  Take care to put plenty of raisins.

“_Brunndi-sauce ka sat?_”[104]

Footnote 104:

   With brandy sauce?

“_Na._ Put into whiskey-shrab. _Brunndi burra dom hai._[105] And
_dekko_, curry _hazri na muncta_, tiffin _muncta_.”

Footnote 105:

   Brandy is a large price.

This last statement is to the effect that curry does not want breakfast,
wants tiffin, but the heathen mind never translates the memsahib
literally. It picks the words it knows out of her discourse and links
them together upon a system of probabilities which long application and
severe experiences have made remarkably correct. Then it salaams and
acts. The usually admirable result is misleading to the memsahib, who
naturally ascribes it to the grace and force and clearness of her
directions. Whereas it is really the discernment of Kali Bagh that is to
be commended.

Considering the existence of the Higher and Lower Standard there is less
difference between the Hindustani of Anglo-Indian ladies and
Anglo-Indian gentlemen than one would expect. The sahib has several
choice epithets that do not attach themselves to the vocabulary of the
memsahib, who seldom allows her wrath to run to anything more abusive
than “Son-of-an-Owl,” or “Poor-kind-of-man,” and the voice of the sahib
is in itself a terrible thing so that all his commands are more
emphatic, more quickly to be obeyed. But he is pleased to use much the
same forms of speech as are common to the memsahib, and if he isn’t
understood he will know the reason why. The same delicate autocracy
pervades the sahib’s Hindustani as characterises most of his relations
with his Indian fellow-subjects. He has subdued their language, as it
were, to such uses as he thinks fit to put it, and if they do not choose
to acquire it in this form, so much the more inconvenient for them. He
can always get another kitmutgar. The slight incongruities of his system
do not present themselves to the sahib. He has a vague theory that one
ought not to say _tum_[106] to a Rajah, but he doesn’t want to talk to
Rajahs—he didn’t come out for _that_. So that my accuracy need not be
doubted I will quote the case of Mr. Perth Macintyre, and I am quite
sure that if Mr. Perth Macintyre were to be presented to the Nizam of
Hyderabad to-morrow—an honour he would not at all covet—he would find
nothing better to say to him in Hindustani than “_Atcha hai?_”[107]—the
formula he would use to a favourite syce.

Footnote 106:

  You (familiar).

Footnote 107:

  Are you well? (familiar).

Mrs. Browne had a great aptitude for languages. She had brought her
German prizes with her, and used to look at them with much satisfaction
when the problem of conquering Hindustani was new to her, and she
thought it would be a matter of some difficulty. She had ambitious ideas
at first, connected with a grammar and a dictionary, and one January
afternoon she learned a whole page of rules for the termination of the
feminine. Mrs. Macdonald found her at it, and assured her earnestly that
she was “going the wrong way about it.” “With all you have to do,”
declared Mrs. Macdonald, “you’ll never get to the end of that book, and
when you do you’ll have forgotten the beginning. Whatever is the
difference to you whether ghoree is the feminine for horse, or what the
plural is! They’re all gorahs! Now I picked up Hindustani in the
ordinary way. I listened, and whenever I didn’t know a thing I asked my
ayah what its name was—and in two months I spoke the language
_fluently_. So will you, but never with a grammar; a grammar won’t help
you to order dinner. Neither will a dictionary—you won’t find
‘hoss-nallis’ in a dictionary. That’s Hindustani for ‘horse-radish.’
It’s awfully funny, how like English the language is in some words?”

“Is it?” said Helen, “I hadn’t noticed that. It must be quite easy to
learn, then.”

“Oh, _quite_! For instance, where we say ‘stable,’ and ‘coat,’ and
‘beer,’ they say ‘ishtable,’ and ‘coatee,’ and ‘beer-shrab.’ And the
Hindustani for ‘kettle’ is ‘kettley,’ and for ‘bottle,’ ‘botle.’ Oh,
it’s not a difficult language!”

One does not cling to a manual of Hindustani in the face of the
protestations of one’s friends, and Mrs. Browne found herself induced to
abandon hers before the terminations for the feminine were quite fixed
in her mind. One might just as well acquire the language in a less
laborious way. So she paid diligent attention, for one thing, to
ordinary Anglo-Indian conversation, which is in itself a very fair
manual of Hindustani. There is hardly any slang in Anglo-India, the
tongue of the gentle Hindu supplies a substitute for that picturesque
form of expression. It permeates all classes of society, that is, both
Covenanted and Uncovenanted classes; and there are none so dignified in
speech as to eschew it. Mrs. Wodenhamer uses it, and the missionaries’
wives. It is ever on the tongue of Kitty Toote; I have no doubt it
creeps into the parlance of Her Excellency. Therefore it cannot be
vulgar. Only this morning, Mrs. Jack Lovitt in the course of ten
minutes’ conversation in my drawing-room simply scintillated with it.
She wanted to know if it was pucca that we were going home for good next
hot weather, and remarked that it was a pity we had the house on a long
bundabust,[108] it was always such a dick and worry to get rid of a
lease. One of her kitmutgars had been giving her trouble—she was afraid
he was a bad jat of man—he was turning out a regular budmash.[109] He
attended to his hookums[110] very well, but he was always getting into
golmals[111] with the other servants. Had I heard the gup about Walter
Toote’s being in trouble with his Department? Awful row on, Mrs. Lovitt
believed. And had I been at Government House the night before? It was
getting altogether too gurrum[112] for nautches now. As for her, she had
been up every blessed night for a week with Mrs. Gammidge’s
butcha[113]—awfully bad with dysentery, poor little wretch—and was too
done to go. It was quite time the season was over, and yet they had
three burra-khanas[114] on for next week.

Footnote 108:

  Agreement.

Footnote 109:

  Blackguard.

Footnote 110:

  Orders.

Footnote 111:

   Rows.

Footnote 112:

   Hot.

Footnote 113:

   Offspring.

Footnote 114:

   Big dinners.

It will be evident that a very limited amount of intercourse of this
sort will assist tremendously toward a self-satisfying acquaintance with
Hindustani. There is a distinct flavour of the language about it. But
this lingers only in India. We leave it when we sail away from the
Apollo Bunder,[115] where it attaches itself to the first new-comers. It
belongs to the land of the kitmutgar; it forsakes us utterly in
Kensington.

Footnote 115:

   The Bombay jetty.

Mrs. Browne found it very facilitating, and if she did not finally learn
to speak like a native she speedily learned to speak like a memsahib,
which was more desirable. In the course of time young Browne forgave her
the agonies her initiation cost him. They began early in the morning
when Helen remarked that it was a very “atcha” day, they continued at
breakfast when she asked him if he would have an “unda”[116] or some
“muchli”[117] or some “tunda beef,”[118] and it went on at intervals
from five o’clock till bed-time. It was her impression, poor dear thing,
that she was humorous in this—it was not for six whole months that she
learned how Anglo-India sanctions Hindustani for grim convenience only,
declining to be amused by it in any way whatever, and has placed its own
stamp upon such time-established expressions as are admissible. More
than these are recognised to come of vanity and the desire of display,
and Anglo-India will have none of them. In the meantime Mrs. Browne
trespassed daily, smiling and unaware. At first her George received
these pleasantries with a pained smile. Then he looked solemn, then
severe. When Mrs. Browne’s lapses had been particularly flagrant a chill
fell upon their intercourse which she was puzzled to understand.
Whereupon she tried to dissipate it by the jocular use of more
Hindustani, which made young Browne wriggle in his chair. They arrived
at a point where it was obviously impossible to go on. It did not occur
to young Browne to propose a separation, though he had shocking liver
that day, but he arose suddenly and said he’d be hanged if he’d stand
being talked Hindustani to any longer. Thereat Mrs. Browne, being a
person of tender feelings, wept. Whereat Mr. Browne, being a man of
sentiment in spite of liver complications, was instantly reduced to
nothingness and suppliance, when explanations of course ensued, and
Helen was made acquainted with most of the information in this chapter.
In the upshot, whether Mrs. Browne never spoke a word of Hindustani
again, as she proposed, or spoke it all day long for a year and nothing
could be sweeter, as he proposed, I have never been made aware.

Footnote 116:

  Egg.

Footnote 117:

  Fish.

Footnote 118:

  Cold beef.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XXI.


[Illustration: Decoration]


IT would be improper to pretend to chronicle even the simple adventures
of a memsahib without a respectful reference to their clerical side. The
reference will be slight; but it must be made, if only in answer to Aunt
Plovtree’s communication upon the subject, in which she took the trouble
to remark particularly how curious it was that Helen’s letters said so
little about parish matters or a clergyman. One might almost fancy, said
Aunt Plovtree, that such things did not exist in India; and it is highly
inadvisable that these chapters should produce a similar impression.
Helen replied to her aunt that on the contrary there were several
churches scattered about Calcutta, with clergymen attached to all of
them, also an Archdeacon and a Bishop. Some were higher than others—the
clergymen she meant—and she believed that a number of them were very
nice. She didn’t know any of the clergymen themselves yet; but she had
met one or two of the wives of the junior chaplains, and one she thought
an awfully sweet woman. The Archdeacon she didn’t know by sight, the
Bishop she had seen once at a distance. They—the Brownes—were not quite
sure which parish they belonged to yet; but when they found out she
would be sure to mention anything connected with it that she thought
would interest her dearest Aunt Plovtree. Doubtless Mrs. Plovtree
thought that this left something to be desired, and if my chapter should
provoke the same opinion I can only deplore without presuming to
question it.

The Government of India provides two medical departments for the benefit
of its servants: one for the body and one for the soul. The Government
of India has the reputation of being a hard taskmaster, but its
liberality is not questioned here, unless one cavils at being obliged to
pay one’s own undertaker. It has arranged, educated, graduated, and
certificated assistance in all cases of bodily and spiritual extremity
free of charge, assuming, however, no ultimate responsibility, except
towards the higher grades of the Covenanted Ones. To them, I believe, it
guarantees heaven; but it is difficult to obtain accurate information
upon this point, especially as that state is apt to be confounded out
here with the rank and privileges of a Knight Commander of the Order of
the Star of India.

It is, of course, a debatable question—I speak here of the senior
chaplains; the junior chaplains suffer an almost prohibitive baby-tax,
which, to a junior chaplain, is a serious financial consideration, and
his pay is not luxurious—but I have always understood that the spiritual
service of the Raj is not such an excessively bad thing. I know that
comparatively few of its members are of this opinion, and I have no
doubt that the peculiarly agreeable absence of theological controversy
in India is due to the fact that the energy of reverend gentlemen is
largely occupied in popularising a different one. Still it remains the
lay idea that the chaplains of the Government of India are in their
father-in-law’s house. The term of service is brief, and during its
course the reverend servant may claim to write his sermons and proclaim
the example of the wicked man for three years comfortably in a
hill-station, where his clerical liver need never compel his clerical
temper to spend itself unbecomingly upon kitmutgars. His pay is
moderate, but as high probably as could be considered prudent in view of
the undesirability of encouraging worldliness in a spiritual department,
and it is not written in his contract that the beady simpkin shall
enhance his little dinner parties.

“Pegs, claret, and beer for a junior chaplain,” remarked one of
Calcutta’s spiritual advisers to me once; “but sherry is expected as
well of a senior chaplain, and even curaçoa!” He spoke ruefully, for he
was a senior chaplain, and given to hospitality. The reverend
brotherhood are eligible for three months’ privilege leave every year
upon full pay, and three years’ furlough during service on half pay. In
addition to which they do not scruple to hold “retreats,” also doubtless
upon full official allowances, though their cardinal features may be
fish and eggs. They enter into their reward early, and it is a
substantial one—three hundred a year, and such pickings as offer
themselves in England to reverend gentlemen with a competency. Neither
is the exercise of faith required of them in regard to it; it is in the
bond. In this respect it is obvious that the Indian vineyard offers a
distinct advantage over others, where the labourers are expected to be
contented with abstract compensations to be enjoyed after their decease.
Popularly they are known as “padres,” which is a Portuguese survival
more respectable than any other, and a demi-official tag which admits
its owner to society. It ought to be mentioned that the Indian padre
does not move in the atmosphere of feminine adoration which would be
created for him in England; there are too many other men for that.
Doubtless the more attractive of the junior chaplains, sent out, as it
were, in cotton wool, miss the little attentions of the ladies of the
parish at home, but then they have their polo ponies and their pegs.

There were various reasons why Mrs. George Browne had been compelled to
write to her inquiring aunt that as yet she had not the pleasure of any
clergyman’s acquaintance. The padres are official, for one thing, and
one does not approach an official in India—especially if one is a
commercial—without some appropriate excuse. When the Brownes wanted to
be married a reverend gentleman married them, and did it very well—as
they always do in the cathedral—for I was looking on. If either of them
had since required to be buried he would doubtless have done that with
the same ability, despatch, and desire to oblige. He might also in the
future be applied to with propriety in connection with a christening. If
the Brownes’ water-pipes leaked the Brownes would with equal and similar
propriety request the Municipal Engineer to mend them and they would be
mended, but the Municipal Engineer would probably not consider himself
naturally drawn within the circle of the Brownes’ amicable social
relations in consequence. Mrs. Browne would not call upon Mrs. Municipal
Engineer to assure her that they were well mended. The spiritual
official also discharges his duty as specified, and one would have an
equal hesitation, generally, in interpreting it too broadly. And,
indeed, with only the forms and papers relating to the nuptial,
baptismal, and burial business of the capital upon his hands the
Calcutta cleric may claim to be overburdened. His cemetery work alone
would keep a hill padre from all sloth and fatness.

_Bien entendu_, the missionary padres are different. The missionary
padres are not official. I have no doubt the Government would interfere
to prevent their being eaten if the Bengali baboo were carnivorous; but
he is not, he has no fleshy tastes; he prefers an inglorious diet of
rice, fried sweetmeats and mango chutney, to even a stalled chaplain,
beside whom a missionary padre is lean and tough. Moreover, the Bengali
baboo was never designed for the shedding of blood. So that the
Government has really no responsibilities toward the missionary padres.
It will educate and sanitate the baboo, but it leaves his salvation to
private enterprise, undertaking nothing on behalf of the
_entrepreneurs_.

The missionary padre receives his slender stipend from the S. P. G. or
from some obscure source in America. It is arranged upon a scale to
promote self-denial, and it is very successful. He usually lives where
the drains are thickest and the smells most unmanageable, and when we of
the broad river and the great Maidan happen to hear of his address, we
invariably ejaculate, “What a frightfully long way off!” The
ticca-gharry is not an expensive conveyance, but the missionary padre
finds himself better commended of his conscience if he walks and pays
the cost of his transportation in energy and vitality, which must be
heavy in the hot weather and the rains. For the rest, he lives largely
upon second-class beef and his ideals, though they don’t keep very well
either in this climate. Those who come out celibates remain celibates if
not by force of conviction by force of circumstances. The expensively
home-bred young ladies of Anglo-India are not for missionaries! Whereas
those who are married are usually married to missionary ladies of
similar size and complexion labouring in the same cause. Covenanted
chaplains, on the contrary, with the prospects I have mentioned, may be
yoked together with the _débutante_ of any season. So there is this
further difference, that while the official padre’s wife looks like any
other memsahib, the missionary padre’s wife looks like the missionary
padre. I believe that chaplains sometimes ask missionary padres to
dinner “quietly,” and always make a point of giving them plenty to eat.
And I remember meeting a married pair of them at the Brownes’, a Mr. and
Mrs. Week. Young Browne had known Mr. Week at school before his vocation
appeared to him. He was an undersized young man, high-shouldered, very
hollow-chested, and wore his long hair brushed back from his high
forehead, almost, one might say, behind his ears. She was a little white
woman in a high dress, and wore her locks, which were beginning to thin,
in a tiny knot at the very back of her crown. It was in the hot weather,
and they spoke appreciatively of the punkah. They had no punkah, it
seemed, either day or night; but the little wife had been very clever,
and had made muslin bags for their heads and hands to keep off the
mosquitoes while they were asleep. We couldn’t ascertain that either of
them had ever been really well since they came out, and they said they
simply made up their minds to have sickness in the house during the
whole of the rains. It was either neuralgia or fever that season
through, and neither of them knew which was worst. I asked Mrs. Week
inadvertently if she had any children. She said “No,” and there was a
silence which Helen explained afterwards by telling me that Mrs. Week
had lost her only baby from diphtheria, which they attributed to a
certain miasma that “came up through the floor.”

Young Browne tried to make the conversation, but it invariably turned to
some aspect of the “work,” and left him blundering and embarrassed, with
no resource except to beg Mrs. Week to have another slice of the joint.
They knew little of the Red Road or the Eden Gardens, where the band
plays in the evening; they talked of strange places—Khengua Puttoo’s
Lane—Coolootollah. Mrs. Week told us that her great difficulty in the
zenanas lay in getting the ladies to talk. They liked her to come, they
were always pleased and polite, but they seemed interested in so few
things. When Mrs. Week had asked them if they were well, and how much of
a family they had, and how old the children were, there seemed to be no
getting any further, and she could _not_ chew betel with them. Mrs. Week
said she had tried, but it was no use. She loved her zenana ladies, they
were dear things, and she knew they were attached to her, but they were
provoking, too, sometimes. One day last week she had talked very
seriously to them for nearly an hour, and they had seemed most
attentive. Just as she was going away one of them—an old lady—approached
her, with cast-down eyes and great reluctance, wishing to speak. Mrs.
Week encouraged her to begin—was she at last to see some fruit of her
visits? And the old lady had said “_Eggi bat_,” would the memsahib
please to tell them why she put those shiny black hooks in her hair?

Everybody laughed; but Mrs. Week added gravely that she had shown them
the use of hairpins, and taken them a packet next day, to their great
delight. “One never can tell,” said Mrs. Week, “what these trifles may
lead to.”

And Mr. Week had been down in the Sunderbunds, far down in the
Sunderbunds where the miasmas are thickest, and where he had slept every
night for a week on a bench in the same small room with two baboos and
the ague. Mr. Week had found the people very much interested in the joys
of the future state; their attention only flagged, he said, when he
referred to the earthly preparation for them. Mr. Week was more
emaciated than clever. He spoke with an enthusiastic cockney twang of
his open-air meetings and discussions in Dhurrumtollah, of the anxiety
with which the baboos wished to discuss the most recondite theological
points with him. “Yes,” said Mr. Perth Macintyre, “the baboo is a great
buck-wallah.”[119] There is reason to fear that the lay community of
Calcutta is rather inclined to consider the baboo’s soul an unproved
entity.

Footnote 119:

  Talker.

Returning to the senior and junior chaplains, it is delightful to see
the natural man under the Indian surplice. At home the padre is an
order, in India he is an individual. He is not suppressed by parish
opinion, he is rather encouraged to expand in the smile of the Raj,
which is above all and over all. He is official, joyous, free, and he
develops happily along the lines which Nature designed for him before
ever he turned aside into the crooked paths of theology. It is seeing by
these lights that we say so often of an Indian padre, “What an excellent
politician, broker, soldier, insurance agent he would have made?”

Being now, as one might say, a sheep of some age and experience and
standing in the community, I have agreeable recollections of many
shepherds. Most of them have long since retired upon pension, while the
flock is still wistfully baaing over the bars toward the west. Doubtless
the reunion will not be long deferred. It will take place at
Bournemouth, and we will talk of the debased value of the rupee. For
one, I should like to see Padre Corbett again—he would be able to
express himself so forcibly on the subject of the rupee. Padre Corbett,
it is my certain belief, entered the Church because there was no
practicable alternative. He looked facts in the face in a business-like
manner, shook his big square head over them, smoked a farewell pipe to
the sturdy _bétises_ of his youth, and went in for orders under the
advice of a second cousin in the India Office. Then he came out to
minister to the soul of Tommy Atkins in Murshidabad, where it is very
hot, and whether it was the heat of Murshidabad, or the atmosphere of
military discipline there, Padre Corbett got into the way of ordering
Tommy Atkins to come to be saved and not to answer back or otherwise
give trouble about it, that I remember him by. Padre Corbett never lost
the disciplinary air and ideas of Murshidabad. As he marched up the
aisle of peaceful St. Ignatius in Calcutta behind his choir boys, there
was a distinct military swagger in the rear folds of his surplice, and
he put us through our devotional drill with the rapidity and precision
of a field-marshal. “Fours about! _Trot!_ you miserable sinners!” he
gave us to understand at the beginning of the Psalms, and the main
battalion of St. Ignatius in the pews, following the directing flank
under the organ came on from _laudite_ to _laudite_ at a magnificent
pace. The sermon was a tissue of directions and a statement of
consequences; we were deployed out of church. We bowed to it, it was
quite befitting. We were not Tommy Atkinses, but we were all officially
subordinated to Padre Corbett in a spiritual sense; in the case of an
archangel from Simla it would be quite the same, and he was perfectly
entitled to “have the honor to inform” us that we would do well to mend
our ways. This sense of constituted authority and the fitness of things
would naturally lead Padre Corbett to the chaste official glories of the
archdeaconry. Indeed, I’m not sure that it didn’t.

[Illustration: MR. WEEK SLEPT ON A BENCH IN THE SAME SMALL ROOM, WITH
TWO BABOOS AND THE AGUE.]

The Rev. T. C. Peterson, too, once of St. Pancras. I wonder in what
rural corner of South Devonshire Padre Peterson to-day entertains Dorcas
meetings with innocently amusing accounts of domestic life in India! He
was always by way of being amusing, was Padre Peterson; he had a fine
luminous smile, which he invariably took with him when he went out to
dine. He was kindly and unostentatious, he lived simply and quietly,
giving a little of his money to the poor and putting a great deal of it
into the Bank of Bengal pending a desirable rate of exchange. Padre
Peterson was every inch a padre; there was nothing but ecclesiastical
meekness in _his_ surplice of a Sunday; and even his secular expression,
notwithstanding the smile, spoke of high ideals and an embarrassed
compromise with week-day occupations. He had a humble, hopeful way of
clasping his hands and sloping his shoulders and arranging his beard
over his long black cassock, especially when he sat at meat, which
reminded one irresistibly, though I admit the simile is worn, of an
oriel apostle in stained glass. He was seriously happy, and he made old,
old Anglo-Indian jokes with his luminous smile in a manner which was
peculiarly maddening to the enlarged liver of Calcutta. He would have
hesitated to employ coercion even as a last resort with his flock of St.
Pancras. He was no shepherd with a cracking whip, he would go before
rather, and play upon the lute and dance and so beguile the sheep to
follow. His amiability was great; he was known to “get on” with
everybody. Nobody knew precisely why Padre Peterson always got
everything he wanted, but it was obscurely connected with the abounding
charity for sinners in general, and official sinners in high places in
particular, which was so characteristic of him. He could placate an
angry Under-Secretary, and when an Under-Secretary is angry India quakes
and all the Lieutenant-Governors go to bed. The finances in St. Pancras
were never in better hands. St. Pancras had a new organ, a new font, and
new beams and rafters all through in Padre Peterson’s day. If new graves
and gravestones had been as urgently required then as they are now,
Padre Peterson would have found the money and had the thing done at the
lowest contract rates. A remarkable man in many ways, and now that I
think of it, he’s dead, quite a long time ago.

Others I seem to remember best in some secular connection. Padre
Jenkins, whose pony won the Gymkhana Cup at the Barrackpore races of I
can’t remember just what year; Padre MacWhirter, who used to say very
truly that he made golf what it was in Alipore; Padre Lewis-Lewis, who
had for five years the most charming manners and the best choir in
Calcutta. But there is no reason why I should count them over to you.
Long since they have disappeared, most of them, with their little flat
black felt hats on their heads and their tennis racquets in their hand,
into the fogs of that northerly isle whither in the end we all go and
whence none of us return. This chapter is really more of an apology to
Mrs. Plovtree than anything else.

Mrs. Plovtree will be grieved, however, and justly so, that I have not
said more about the Indian bishop. The explanation is that I have never
known a bishop very well, as I have never known a Viceroy very well.
Even at my own dinner-table I have never permitted myself to observe a
bishop beyond the point of admiration. Some day in Bournemouth, however,
I will write a thoughtful essay on the points of similarity, so far as I
have noticed them, between Indian bishops and other kinds, and sent it
to the _Guardian_, where Mrs. Plovtree will be sure to see it; but it is
not considered wise in India to write critical estimates of bishops or
of any other heads of departments until after one retires. I might just
say that the bishop, like the Viceroy, is a foreign plenipotentiary. He
does not rise from the withered ranks of the Indian service, but, like
the Viceroy, comes out fresh from the culling hand of the Secretary of
State. He divides with the Viceroy certain Divine rights, divinest of
which is the right not to care a parrot’s eyelash for anybody. In
consequence the bishop holds his venerable head high and dines where he
pleases. Certain of the Raj-enthralled of Calcutta find the independence
of a bishop offensive. In me it provokes a lively enthusiasm. I consider
the episcopal attitude even more valuable than the episcopal blessing,
even more interesting than the episcopal discourse. And I agree with
Mrs. Browne, who thinks it must be lovely to be a bishop.

But neither for our spiritual pastors and masters are times what they
were. There was a day, now faded, with all the rollicking romance of
John Company Bahadur, when two honest butts of golden crown madeira a
year helped to alleviate the sorrows of exile for King George’s
chaplains in India—the present Secretary of State would probably see
them teetotallers first! The mails come out in a fortnight, the
competition-wallah over-runs the land, the Rajah studies French. India
is not what it was, and another of the differences is that the padres
buy their own madeira.

I saw a priest of Kali, wrapped in his yellow chuddar, sit hugging his
knees under a mahogany tree to-night beside the broad road where the
carriages passed rolling into the “cow’s dust” of the twilight. A
brother cleric of the Raj went by in his victoria with his wife and
children, and the yellow robed one watched them out of sight. There was
neither hatred nor malice nor any evil thing in his gaze, only perhaps a
subtle appreciation of the advantages of the other cloth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XXII.


HAVING suited themselves with the furnished house of a junior civilian,
who had suddenly decamped before heat apoplexy and gastric
complications, the Brownes settled down, if the expression is not too
comfortable, to wait for the rains. I should dislike any
misunderstanding on the point of comfort. It is not too much to say that
the word is not understood in Calcutta. We talk of _aram_ here instead,
which means a drugged ease with heavy dreams.

The Brownes stored their furniture in the godowns of the other man, and
had _aram_ nevertheless in contemplating his, which was ugly. _Aram_ is
cheap—the price of a cup of coffee and a long veranda chair—and
seductive; but I was annoyed with Helen Browne for accepting the other
people’s furniture so pacifically. It seemed to me that she was becoming
acclimatised too soon. There is a point in that process where a born
British gentlewoman will live without antimacassars and sleep on a
charpoy; but I do not wish to be considered a morbid modern analyst, so
this need not be enlarged upon. The other people’s furniture, moreover,
would have been entertaining if it could have talked, to so many people
it had been let and sub-let and re-let and leased, always with the
house, since it left Bow Bazar, where it was originally bought outright
by an extravagant person second-hand. It had never belonged to anybody
since: it had always been a mere convenience—a means of enabling people
to give dinner parties. No one had ever regarded it, or mended it, or
kept it any cleaner than decency required. It was tarnished, cracked,
frayed, soiled; it included tables with white marble tops, and bad
chromo-lithographs and dusty bunches of dried grasses which nobody had
ever taken the trouble to eliminate. In the cold weather certain people
had paid five hundred rupees a month for the privilege of living with
it; in the hot weather certain other people had lived with it for
nothing, to keep the white ants out. Withal it was typical Calcutta
furniture—a typical part of the absurd pretence that white people make
of being at home in this place.

The rains are due, as all Calcutta knows, on June the fifteenth. That is
the limit of our time of pure grilling. We know it is written upon our
foreheads that we must turn and writhe and bite the dust in the pain of
the sun to that day; but on that day we expect that the clouds will come
up out of the east and out of the west and clothe the brazen sky, and
interpose between us and the dolour of India. It is what we call a pucca
bandobust, arranged through the Meteorological Department, part of the
bargain of exile with the Secretary of State. For so many years of
active service we get so much pension and so much furlough, and we are
to be rained upon every fifteenth of June for three months.

Therefore when the sun arose upon the fifteenth of June of this current
year of the Brownes, and marched across the sky without winking, the
Brownes were naturally and properly aggrieved together with the Bengal
Government and all Calcutta. When one has defined the very point and
limit of one’s endurance, it is inconsistent and undignified to go on
enduring. The ticca-gharry horses were so much of this opinion that they
refused too, and dropped down dead all up and down Chowringhee, as a
preferable alternative—those that were driven. The more prudent
gharry-wallah drew up in the reeking shade of some great building—it was
cooler in the streets than in the stables—and slept profoundly, refusing
all fares till sundown; and the broker-sahib, who spends his life upon
wheels, changed horses four times a day. On the night of the fifteenth
of June young Browne got up stealthily and deftly turned a jug of water
over a hole in the floor through which a punkah rope hung inert. There
was a sudden scramble below, the punkah rope sawed convulsively, and
young Browne, with a ghastly smile, put out the glimmering candle and
went back to bed. It is a popular form of discipline in Calcutta, but as
applied by young Browne it bore strikingly upon the weather.

The Maidan cracked and split, and even the broad leaves of the teak-wood
tree hung limp and grey under the powder of the road. The crows had
nothing to say all day, but hopped about with their beaks ridiculously
agape, while the sun blazed down through the flat roofs of Calcutta, and
made Mrs. Browne’s chairs and tables so hot that it was a surprise to
touch them. At the same time it drew up the evil soul of the odour of
the bazars, the “_burra krab_[120] smell,” as Kipling calls the chief
characteristic of Calcutta, and cast it abroad in all the city. The
Brownes squandered sums upon Condy’s fluid wholly disproportionate with
their income vainly, for nothing yet known to pharmacy can cope with
that smell. It grew hotter and hotter, and sometimes the south wind
failed, and then the smell became several smells, special, local,
individual, though the frangi-panni tree leaned blooming on its spiky
elbows over every garden wall, and made them all sweet and langorous and
interesting and truly Eastern. The smells were not of great consequence;
one gets accustomed to the smells as one gets accustomed to the curries.
Mrs. Browne declared, too, that one could put up with the weather, and
the cholera, and sunstroke—one didn’t particularly mind even having
one’s house turned inside out occasionally by a dust-storm. The really
trying things—the things one hadn’t reckoned with beforehand—were that
one’s envelope flaps should all stick down; that the pages of one’s
books should curl up; that the towel should sting one’s face; that the
punkah should stop in the night. Even under these greater afflictions we
are uncomplaining up to the fifteenth of June. But the sixteenth passed
over these Brownes, and the seventeenth and the eighteenth, and many
days more, and still the dusty sun went down in the smoky west, and
against the great red glow of his setting the naked beesties ran like
black gnomes with their goat skins on their hips, slaking the roads that
were red too.... And a mile and a league all round about the city the
ryot folded his hands before his baking rice-fields, not knowing that
men wrote daily in the _Englishman_ about him, and wondered in what way
he had offended Lakshmi that for so many days she should withhold the
rain!

Footnote 120:

  Very bad.

                  *       *       *       *       *

A shutter banged downstairs at three o’clock in the morning, there came
a cool swishing and a subsiding among the fronds of the date palms, the
gold mohur trees raised their heads and listened—it was coming. Far down
in the Sunderbunds it was raining, and with great sweeps and curves it
rained further and further inland. Calcutta turned more easily upon its
pillow, and slept sound and late, the punkah-wallah slept also with
impunity, and when the city awoke in the morning the rains had come.

Mrs. Browne professed to find a great difference and novelty in the
rains of India. She declared that they came from lower down, that they
were whiter and greyer, that they didn’t refresh the earth, but beat it
and sat upon it, that there was quite an extraordinary quality of
moisture about them. I believe every new-comer makes similar
observations. To the rest of us, it has been obvious for so many years
that during July, August, and September a considerable amount of water
descends upon Bengal, that we have ceased to make original remarks about
it. But Bengal certainly gets very wet, and Mrs. Browne’s observations
as the time went on, and the floods abated not, were entirely excusable.
Every day it rained, more in the morning and less in the evening, or
less in the morning and more in the evening. The garden became a jungle,
the English flowers that had died a puzzled death in May, sent up
hysterical long shoots; one could see the grass growing. An adjutant
sailed in from the mofussil[121] marshes, trailing his legs behind him,
to look for frogs on the Maidan. He stood on one leg to look for them,
upon the bronze head of Lord Lawrence, and his appearance, with his chin
buried thoughtfully in his bosom, was much more sapient than that of the
administrator underneath. In the evening he flew back again, and then
the frogs were at liberty to express their opinion of him. They spoke
strongly, as was natural; one of them, in the tank of Ram Dass
Hurrymunny, barked like a pariah. The crickets did their concerted best
to outvoice the frogs, the cicadas reinforced the crickets, and all the
other shrill-voiced things that could sing in the dark, sang in such a
wheezy heaving eternal monotone, that Mr. and Mrs. Browne, sitting
damply behind their open windows, were quite reduced to silence.

Footnote 121:

  A Country.

[Illustration: HE STOOD UPON ONE LEG ON THE BRONZE HEAD OF LORD
LAWRENCE.]

They were planting the little green rice shoots in the mofussil, they
wanted it all and more; but Mrs. Browne in Calcutta was obliged to look
in the newspapers for the assurance that she ought to be thankful for
quite so much rain. It seemed to Mrs. Browne that all her relations with
the world were being submerged, and that she personally was becoming too
wet. She found it an unnatural and unpleasant thing that furniture
should perspire; and when in addition to the roof leaking, and the
matting rotting, and the cockroaches multiplying, the yellow sunset and
the blue sea of her nicest water-colour mixed themselves up in a
terrible and crumpled and impossible manner, Mrs. Browne added tears to
the general moisture, and thought the very fabric of her existence was
dissolving. Besides that, the Rev. Peachey came unglued out of his blue
plush frame, and Aunt Plovtree developed yellow spots. Moreover, a green
mould sprouted in the soles of their shoes, fresh every morning, and
Helen’s evening dresses and gloves “went,” as she expressed it in
writing to Canbury, “all sorts of colours.” To pass over the fact that
centipedes began to run in their playful zigzag way across the floor,
and young Browne killed a snake in the veranda, which he was not
indisposed to believe a cobra. Helen thought there was no room for doubt
about it, and, as a matter of fact, one hardly ever hears of a snake
being killed in Calcutta that is not a cobra. The harmless varieties
have a remarkable facility in keeping out of the way.

All over India it was raining, coming down hard on the marginless
plains, on the great slopes of the Himalayas, on the great cities where
the bunnias hive gold in the bazars, on the little thatched brown
villages where the people live and die like harmless animals, with the
memory that once or twice they have had enough to eat.

But more than anywhere it seemed to rain in Calcutta, where only about
six feet of solid ground intervenes between the people and the
bottomless miry pit. So that it is telling the literal truth to say that
Calcutta was soaked through and through, dripping, reeking,
pestilentially drunken with water. Infinite deeps below, infinite
sources above, between the two a few macadamised roads, and an
inadequate supply of gutters and drain-pipes. And yet it is not recorded
that at any time Calcutta has succumbed to the rains, and sunk swamped
into herself.

Nevertheless, at first it was a few degrees cooler, and, to borrow a
phrase from the press, there was a slight increase in social activity.
People began to give dinners. There are people in Bengal whom all the
manifestations of Providence and of Nature together would not prevent
giving dinners. They find it agreeable to feel the warming, drying
influence of the various forms of carbon prepared by the khansamah in
company. They talk of appointments, promotions, and the
Lieutenant-Governor, and they chatter as if the ague were already upon
them, about how much more sociable Calcutta is in the rains than in the
cold weather—you get to know people so much better.

Then there were days when it didn’t rain; it shone. Early in the morning
it shone with a vague and watery brilliance in the sky, and a curious
white gleam over the earth. Later the shining was hot, and straight, and
strong, and then Calcutta steamed, and one saw a parboiled baboo at
every corner. Later still the sun went down over the river, and then one
saw hundreds of parboiled baboos everywhere; and on the Maidan, driving
about in carriages, a few score of the very whitest people on earth. The
Brownes were as white as anybody. Privately Helen thought her complexion
much more interesting than it used to be, and coveted a barouche to lean
back and look languidly bored in like the few burra memsahibs that
devotedly stayed in Calcutta. It was impossible to be languid in a
tum-tum, which is an uncompromising vehicle, not constructed to
encourage poses.

Behind their stubby little country-bred, Mr. and Mrs. Browne, taking the
air, saw a Calcutta that never revealed itself to any globe-trotter, and
which you will not find described in the printed experiences in cloth,
at 7s. 6d., of Jonas Batcham, for instance. They saw the broad Maidan
laid out in lakes and rivers, with a theatrical sun, set in purple and
gold, dissolving in each of them, and all the spaces between a
marvellous lushgreen, where the horses sank to their fetlocks. Floating
over it they saw a gossamer white pall that consisted of water and
bacilli in a state of suspension, and hung abreast of the people.
Calcutta has a saving grace, known to her Anglo-Indians as the
Casuarina-avenue. You can lose your soul in the infinite filmy shadows
of the marching trees. Even the Indian sunlight, filtering through their
soft dead green, becomes a delicate thing. The Brownes saw this ranged
before them, misty and wonderful in the evening, hiding the last of the
glow in its plumy nearer branches, and piling up soft clouds of dusk as
it stretched further away. They saw the fort and all the pillared façade
of Chowringhee, with its monuments and palaces and praying places yellow
against a more and more empurpled sky, and the grey spire of the
cathedral rising in its green corner of the Maidan behind a cluster of
trees and a brimming lake, just as it might do in England. Calcutta sits
close beside her river, and there are no miles of teeming wharfage
between her and it. The great ships lie with their noses against the
bank, and the level road runs beside them. Thus, by a wise provision of
the municipality, people who live in Calcutta are able to drive down
every day and see for themselves that it is possible to get away. For
this reason the Brownes loved the close ships and all the populous
river, lying under the wraith of the rains—the faint outlines of the
crowding masts, with the sunset sky behind them as far as they could
see; the majestic grey ghost of the old East Indiamen at anchor, with
her “state cabin” full of dates from Mocha; slipping towards them
solitarily out of the unreality the dipping red-brown three-cornered
sail of an Arab dhow. Eloquently always the river breathed of exile and
of home-going, sometimes with her own proper voice, sometimes with the
tongue of a second mate from Portsmouth, or the twang of a negro cook
from Savannah, full of airs and superciliousness. It depended on where
you lived yourself when you were at home.

On a corner of the Maidan a number of mad young Englishmen played
football; in another place there was a lively sale of goats for
sacrifice. An erection of red and gold paper, like a Chinese pagoda,
still wobbled about the biggest tank in propitiation of its god.
Calcutta emptied itself on its wide green acres. The Brownes met a smart
turnout with a thoroughbred, driven at a spanking pace by a pucca
Chinaman, who leant forward nonchalantly with his pigtail streaming out
behind. They met a fiery pair in a mail-phaeton, with two anxious syces
behind, and driving on the high seat a small, bold, brown lady, all in
green and pink gauze, tinselled, bareheaded, wearing her iniquity as
lightly as a feather. They met a big roomy barouche, with two servants
on the box, two more behind, and an ayah inside, all in attendance upon
a tiny white mite of a belati baby. A small British terrier met them,
regarded them, sniffed them, wagged his tail and followed them. They
were not personal friends of his, but they were sahibs, and his
countrymen; they would understand his lost estate, a sahib’s dog; he
could confide himself to their good feeling and hospitality pending
explanations. And so the stubby little country-bred trotted down the
river road till he came to a place where the road widened—where, beside
an octagonal erection with a roof, a great many other stubby little
country-breds and slender Arabs and big Walers stood very quietly
between their shafts with drooping heads; and here he turned, almost of
his own accord, and trotted in amongst them until he found comfortable
standing room, when he stopped. This was Calcutta’s place of pleasure.
Behind the octagonal erection, where presently the band would play,
stretched those Eden Gardens which the photographers reproduce so
effectively, and the globe-trotters buy so abundantly. Here we have the
elements of the most romantic municipal scenery—tall palms and red
poinsettias, a fine winding artificial lake with a beautiful arched
artificial bridge, realistic artificial rocks cropping out of the grass,
and a genuine Burmese pagoda of white chunam, specially constructed for
the gardens, in the middle of it all. The pagoda runs up into a spire,
or a lightning conductor, or something of that nature; and on the top of
this a frolicsome British tar once placed an empty soda-water bottle
upside down. I think the native municipal commissioners regard this with
some pride as a finial ornament; certainly nobody has ever taken it
down. And that is as well, for the soda-water bottle gives, one might
say, the key to the design of the place, which might otherwise puzzle
the stranger. I should not omit to say that the gardens are illuminated
with electric light, as such gardens of course should be. The people
walk up and down under the electric light, looking at each other; the
young men go in among the carriages and talk to the ladies they know.
Calcutta makes a violent attempt to distract itself. On this particular
evening the Brownes also came to distract themselves—it becomes a habit
in time.

The electric light sputtered and fizzled over the crowd of standing
carriages. Helen thought it darkened the black circle round young
Browne’s eyes; and he asked his wife apprehendingly if she were feeling
chilled or anything—she looked so white. The damp, warm air clung to
their faces. A man in a ticca-gharry said to a man in the road that it
was damned muggy. Several people in the carriages near heard him say
this—it was so quiet. The crowd of carriage-tops gleamed motionless, the
horses stood dejectedly on three legs, and under every horse’s nose a
cotton-clad syce “bitoed”[122] on the ground with his chin on his knees.
A peddling native thrust up a round flat bouquet of pink and white roses
that smelt of “Jockey Club.” “_Jao!_” said young Browne.

Footnote 122:

  Sat on his heels.

Presently the band played a gay and lightsome air, very sad to hear,
from an opera long superseded at home, and with the playing of the band
the general depression seemed to thicken and close down. There are
people in Calcutta who, even for distraction’s sake, cannot stand
selections from the _Mikado_ so near the end of the century. One by one
the carriages began to roll away. Perhaps along the river road there
would be a breath of air. The band played a medley, all sorts of things,
and then “The Land o’ the Leal.” I saw the MacTaggarts drive off.
“_Syce!_” said Mr. Perth Macintyre; “_buttie jallao!_ _Gur ko!_”[123]
... The last of the pink flush faded out of the sky behind the ships.
The air grew sodden and chill, a little raw breeze crept in from the
east. Young Browne took off his hat to “God Save the Queen,” and then “I
think we ought to hurry him a little,” said Helen, referring to the
stubby little country-bred. “It’s going to rain.”

Footnote 123:

  “Light the (carriage) lamps. To the house!”

It was in this month of August, I remember, that we lost a partner of
the firm, in a sad though not unusual way. He died, as a matter of fact,
from a little Calcutta mud which rubbed itself into his elbow one
afternoon when he was thrown out of his brougham. Tetanus the doctors
called it, and they said he would have had a better chance if he had
been thrown out of his brougham at another time of year. He was buried,
poor man, in seven inches of water; and Mr. Perth Macintyre had two
months’ fever after attending the dripping funeral.

It would be an affectation to write about Mrs. Browne’s experiences and
to omit a chapter on at least one phase of the weather; but I could have
told you in the beginning that it would not be amusing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XXIII.


[Illustration: Decoration]


IF you have not entirely forgotten your geography you will know that
against the eternal gold and blue of the Indian sky, across and across
the middle of the land, there runs unevenly a high white line. You will
remember it better, perhaps, as “the trend of the Himalayas,” and it may
have a latter-day association in your mind with imprudent subalterns and
middle-aged ladies who consume a great many chocolates and call each
other “my dear girl.” Out here we never forget it for a single instant;
it survives the boundaries of our native counties, and replaces in our
imaginations every height in Europe. We call it “The Snows,” and the
name is as little presumptuous as any other. It is very far off, and the
more like heaven for that reason; moreover, that way Simla lies, which
is heaven’s outer portal, full of knights and angels. They are distant
and imperturbable, the Snows, we can only gaze and wonder and descend
again to earth; we have only the globe-trotter’s word for it that they
do not belong to another world. It is the brown outer ranges that we
climb, the heaving brown outer ranges that stand between the Holy of
Holies and the eye of the profane, the unbeliever, the alien. Because
these brown outer ranges are such very big mountains it is our pleasure
to call them “The Hills”—if you talked of spending three months in the
mountains it would not be clear that you didn’t mean Switzerland. Here
we perch our hill-stations, here once in every year or two we grow fat
and well-liking, here on the brink of a literal precipice the callow
subalterns and the _blasé_ married ladies flirt.

It was by the merest accident, which I helped to precipitate, that the
Brownes went to the Hills in September. A planter in the Doon[124] had
committed suicide—acute dyspepsia—whose business was in our hands, and
somebody had to go to see about it. The junior partner wanted to go, but
the junior partner had just come out from England weighing fourteen
stone, and I got Mr. Perth Macintyre to persuade him that it was
absolutely necessary to spend two months of the rains in Calcutta if he
wished to recover his figure. Thus to the Brownes also came the hope of
the clean breath of the Hills. I went myself down to Howrah station
after dinner to add my blessing to their luggage, but the train was
gone. A fat baboo of Bengal told me so, with a wreath of marigolds round
his neck. I thought, looking at him, how glad they must be to have
turned their faces toward a country where men eat millet and
chapattis,[125] and are lean.

Footnote 124:

  Valley.

Footnote 125:

  Native cakes of flour and water.

Kasi was there too. Kasi travelled “intermediate,” that is to say
sitting on the floor, quite comfortably, in a wooden box, iron-barred
down the sides to let in light and air. Before the train started Kasi
had unrolled all the rugs and pillows, had made ready soap and towels
and brushes, and had left the sahib who had been very troublesome all
day, and the memsahib who had already unjustly accused him of having
forgotten seven things, with nothing to do but to go to bed and to rise
again. Then he returned to his own place, where his own kind buzzed
about him with flat baskets of sticky brown balls and fried sweetmeats
to sell. Kasi regarded them indifferently and bought nothing; the
kinship was only skin-deep, the lime-marks upon their foreheads were
different, he could not eat from their hands. Secretly, when the shadow
of none fell upon it he took from a little brass box his betel solace,
then as the train whistled he unwound the ten yards of his turban,
wrapped his red chuddar[126] about him, and disposed himself on the
floor to dream of the profit there might be when the sahib took a
journey.

Footnote 126:

  Cloth worn over shoulders.

In the morning a dry coolness blew in at the windows. It had been
raining, it would rain again; but here in Behar the earth had been
needy, and her face had grown lovely with the slaking of her great
thirst. The rain had washed the air and the sun had dried it; to these
dwellers in Calcutta it seemed that they were already on the heights.
All night long they had been going through the rice country, where the
pale green shoots stood knee-deep in the glistening water for miles
around, now they rolled through a land where the crops waved tall with
sprouting ears—maize and millet and wheat. The little villages were
almost lost in them. High over the grain the ryot’s sons kept watch and
ward against the thieving parrots in little open thatched houses stuck
on the top of a long pole or in the fork of a dead tree. They were
perched up there to be safe from the leopard’s spring; the leopards like
a maize-fed ryot’s son. They could give warning, too, if the zemindar’s
servant came that way, to ask an extra tax for the wedding expenses of
his master’s second daughter. The little villages seemed of kindly
disposition; here was a precarious crop that wanted shade, and upon this
field every man had set his bed, one beside another, so that it was
covered. They were at ease, the little villages, the crops throve, there
would be enough for the zemindar if they pretended to be _very_ poor;
nobody would starve that year, and perhaps Malita or Alanga would add a
new silver bangle to her wedding portion.

The Brownes were too utterly poor for the railway restaurants. They
brought a tiffin-basket. Young Browne designed the tiffin-basket, a
Chinaman designed the price. It was as big as a small trunk; it would
just go under the seat. There was room in it for everything that has yet
been thought of in connection with a civilized repast. I believe Mrs.
Browne is now using it as a china and linen closet. It held ten rupees’
worth of tinned stores among other things, and a kerosene stove. Mrs.
Browne filled the rest of it up economically with bread and butter and
cold meat, and young Browne added as an after-thought half a dozen pints
of champagne. It was a modest Anglo-Indian tiffin-basket, and they drew
it forth with much joy in the morning, having the carriage to
themselves. It was seven o’clock and the train had stopped. Servants
were running about the platform with cups of tea and slices of toast for
the _chota hazri_ of people who hadn’t brought tiffin-baskets. “Just for
curiosity, George,” said Helen, “ask how much they are charging?”

Young Browne, in the unconventionality of his pyjamas,[127] leaned out
of the window. “Hi, you!” he called, “_dom kitna?_”[128]

Footnote 127:

  Night garments worn by men in India.

Footnote 128:

  “Price, how much?”

“Aht anna, sahib!”

“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Browne. “_Eight_ annas for a cup of tea and
two bits of toast! The tiffin-basket _is_ a saving, dear!”

“Oh, it is!” responded Mr. Browne, “for the other meals. But now that I
think of it, I want my chota hazri _now_, don’t you? Hi-ups kitmutgar!
_lao chota hazri_ and _jeldi karo_!”[129]

Footnote 129:

  “Bring a little breakfast, and be quick about it!”

“One could so easily boil the water, dear,” objected Mrs. Browne.

“For the other meals. But we can’t cook our chota hazri. Everything’s at
the bottom. We shouldn’t get it ready till midnight. The fact is,” said
young Browne decisively, “we ought to have brought a kitmutgar—that
would have been a saving if you _like_!” And as the steaming tea came
through the window and the price went out, “I don’t think it’s so very
much,” said young Browne.

That is the way they began. The precise number and extent of the
economies effected by the tiffin-basket will never be recorded, but I
believe they drank the champagne.

I doubt either your information or your gratification at being told that
they changed at Mogulsarai. Mogulsarai is on the map, but you will not
find it there because you will not look—which I do not say censoriously;
it is quite enough that Anglo-Indians should be obliged to remember the
names of such places. They are curiously profane, with their crowded
little roofs and their mosque-towers; and they are very hot. The
Brownes’ train lay on a side-track baking, as they entered it, four
coolies bearing the tiffin-basket. The place grilled almost silently,
black and white and grey with converging railway lines encumbered with
trucks; an engine moved about snorting painfully, and nearly naked men
ran in and out under the carriages smiting the wheels. They rolled out
of the place and on for an hour, then over the bridge of the Ganges and
past some old fortifications, and out of the windows they saw Benares,
Benares the impressively filthy, trailing her skirts and her sins in her
great sacred river, but fair, very fair indeed, with the morning
sunlight on the faces of all her gods, and the morning sky behind the
minarets of Aurungzebe.

It was the middle of the night before they reached Lucknow, where they
awoke thirsty. A wide, lighted, orderly station platform, railway
guards walking about in white duck and gold buttons, a single
dissipated-looking little subaltern promenading with his hands in his
pockets. There was no ice, and young Browne sleepily abused the first
railway official that passed the window. “A big station like this, and
the ice allowed to run out in such weather! The thing ought to be
reported.”

“It’s in weather the like o’ this, sir, that the ice _diz_ run out,”
suggested the guard. “Tickets, sir!”

Lucknow, with her tragedy still upon her lips, her rugged walls still
gaping in the white moonlight up yonder, her graves still tenderly
remembered—and the Brownes’ bitter complaint of Lucknow was that they
found no ice there! Ah, little Brownes! I write this of you more in
sorrow than in anger; for I know a soldier’s wife whose husband’s name
you might have read graven on a Lucknow tablet in the moonlight that
night, and when I remember all that she has told me, I find it grievous
that you should even have been aware that there was no ice in Lucknow!

In the morning they were rolling through a lightsome country, all gay
fields and gravelly river-beds, with billows of sunlit air coming in at
the windows, an hour from Saharanpore. A blue hill stood like a cloud on
the edge of the horizon, the Brownes descried it simultaneously and
laughed aloud together. It was so long since they had seen any elevation
greater than their own roof, or a palm-tree, or an umbrella. They got
out at Saharanpore, and Kasi got out at Saharanpore, and the bundles and
the boxes and the bags got out at Saharanpore. They were all as dirty as
they could possibly be, but the people who did not get out at
Saharanpore looked at them enviously, for they had the prospect of being
dirtier still. Arrived at the place of the dâk-bungalow, and the solace
of unlimited ablutions, Mrs. Browne could not imagine in what respect
she had ever found a dâk-bungalow wanting. Could anything be more
delightful than that they should have it entirely to themselves! Between
her first dâk-bungalow and this one Mrs. Browne had made steps towards
the solitary Calcutta ideal. On this occasion she pulled down all the
chicks,[130] and told the solitary box-wallah who had outspread his
wares in the veranda against her arrival to “Jao, jeldi!”

Footnote 130:

  Venetian blinds.

Here they tarried till the following day, when the blowing of a trumpet
aroused them at what they considered an excessively early hour of the
morning. It was their trumpet; they had bought the exclusive right to it
for twelve hours. It belonged to the dâk-gharry that was to take them
from Saharanpore to Dehra, “a distance,” as any guide-book will tell
you, of “forty-two miles.” If you could see a dâk-gharry you would
probably inquire with Mrs. Browne if there wasn’t any other way of
going. There is no other way of going. There are large numbers of places
in India to which there is no other way of going. And if one had
answered you thus, you would have said that if you had known that you
wouldn’t have come. Mrs. Browne said that when she saw the
travelling-carriage of this Orient land of dreamy luxury, but she didn’t
particularly mean it, and neither would you.

In appearance the Browne’s dâk-gharry was a cross between a sun-bonnet
and a blue hearse. This may be a little difficult to imagine; but I
don’t appeal to your imagination, I state facts. It was the shape of a
hearse, and you were supposed to lie down in it, which completed the
suggestion. To counteract the gloomy apprehension of this idea, it was
painted blue inside and out—distinctly a _foncée_ blue. This superficial
cheerfulness was accentuated by shutters in the back and sliding doors
at the sides, and the whole thing was trimmed from the roof with canvas
wings. The top would take as much luggage as the hold of a ship—a small
ship. Inside there was nothing at all, and a place to put your feet.
Kasi condoned this austerity with rugs and pillows, and took his seat
beside the driver, with whom he conversed as affably as his superior
social position would admit. The two Brownes were carefully extended
inside like modern mummies; four native persons of ambiguous appearance
and a persuasive odour fastened themselves on behind. The driver cracked
his whip, and the two meek brown spotted down-trodden horses stood
promptly upon their hind legs pawing the air. They came down in time,
and then they began to back into the dâk-bungalow dining-room. Dissuaded
from this they walked across the road with the intention of putting
themselves in the ditch; and finally, after a terrific expenditure of
language on the part of the driver, they broke into a gallop, which
brought each of the recumbent Brownes inside to a right angle by the
action of some mechanical principle containing a very large element of
alarm. This was not at all a remarkable demonstration. It is the
invincible _dustur_ of every animal in the dâk-gharry business, and is
perfectly understood, locally. The animals attached to the Brownes
galloped their three miles and arrived reeking at the next dâk-stable
without another thought of anything but their business. In the meantime
the local understanding spread to the Brownes, who specified it
afterwards with liniment.

To this impetuous way of going it was a relief, Mrs. Browne told me
afterwards, to hang one’s feet out of the door. The picturesque conduct
of the fresh dâk-ponies every three or four miles displayed novel forms
of vice, interesting to the uninitiated. They bit and strove and kicked,
and one of them attempted to get inside. Helen said it was very wearing
to one’s nerves. But when they had accomplished the little earthquake of
starting there were compensations. The road was green and shaded, as it
would be in England; squirrels frisked from one trunk to another,
silvery doves with burnished breasts cooed in the bamboo branches, and
ever the gracious hills drew nearer and a little nearer.

“These are only the Siwalliks,” remarked young Browne, in a pause of
their jubilant conversation. “Wait till you see the Himalayas on the
other side! The Siwalliks are only rubble. They’re rapidly crumbling
away.”

“If they were in England,” replied Mrs. Browne, watching the little
topmost turrets grow greener, “we wouldn’t admit that they were rubble.
And I don’t believe they’ll crumble away very soon.”

“In a few æons,” returned Mr. Browne superiorly. “It won’t matter to us.
We’re getting regularly up amongst them. This is the beginning of the
pass.”

They had journeyed four hours and had come to a little white bungalow
perched high upon the flank of the nearest hill. Here the khansamah had
a red beard, and swore by it that the sahib had not forewarned him; how
should there be beef and potatoes! Milk and moorghy might be, but eggs
no—the eggs were a little bad.

“For that saying, son of the Prophet,” said young Browne, “backsheesh
will be to you. In Bengal there is no true talk regarding eggs. And now
hasten with the milk and the warmed moorghy curry of the traveller of
yesterday, and dekko, Kasi, tiffin-basket, lao!”

Broad is the road that leads over the Mohun Pass, and beautiful are the
summits that look down on it, but it cannot be climbed with the unaided
strength of horses. It was dull driving but for the sunset behind the
hills, when they put oxen on in the bad places; and still duller when
the sulky, long-haired black buffaloes lent a leg; but there was a
certain picturesqueness in being pulled by the three varieties of beasts
at once, especially when a gang of road-coolies turned in and pushed
behind.

They had always the trumpet, too, which enlivened the whole of that part
of Asia. And wild white balsams grew high on the rocks, and naked little
children, in blue necklaces, played about the road.

There was the blackness of a tunnel, and then the vision of a fair
valley mightily walled in, with the softness of evening still in her
face, and the smoke of her hearth-fires curling up to a purple sky. They
rattled across a quarter of a mile of dry riverbed full of stones, and
were in Dehra, Dehra Doon, where all the hedges drop pink rose-petals,
and the bul-bul sings love songs in Persian, and the sahib lives in a
little white house in a garden which is almost home.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XXIV.


IN Dehra the Brownes were within sight of the promised land, not always
but often. Sometimes it lay quite hidden in some indefinable matted
cloud-region of the sky, and then the last of the September rains came
pelting down the Doon. Sometimes it thrust only a shoulder out of its
cloud garments, and sometimes white fleeces swept over it from morning
till night. But there were other days when the clouds sailed high above
it, trailing their shadows after them, and then indeed the Brownes could
climb to it by a winding road that began at their very feet. The road
ascended to Mussoorie, which twinkled white on a spur above them seven
thousand feet up, and twelve miles off. It would have been perfectly
easy and practicable for them to go to Mussoorie; so easy and
practicable that they didn’t go. When young Browne had looked after the
planter’s tea-bushes, and put a headstone to his grave, and settled his
bills and written home to his people the details of his affairs, there
were eight days over. Mussoorie, the particular paradise of “quiet”
people and retired old gentlemen who mean to die in the country, was an
insignificant achievement for eight days. The Brownes surveyed the great
brown flanks of the hills and burned for a wider conquest. They would go
to Chakrata, high in the heart of the Himalayas to the west, half way to
Simla. They would ride on horseback all the way up and down again to the
railway station at Saharanpore; it would be more than a hundred miles—an
expedition, as young Browne remarked, that they could dine out on for
weeks when they got back to Calcutta. His own statement of their
equipment for the journey is succinct. “We shall want,” said he, “two
ponies, two syces, and an ekka. The ekka will take the luggage, bedding,
Kasi, and the tiffin-basket. The ponies will take us, and the syces will
come along behind. Let us go and hire them.”

They drove out the long shady main road of Dehra, creeping always upward
to Rajpore, upon this business, and on the way Mr. Browne explained to
Mrs. Browne the natural history, character and antecedents of the “bazar
tat.” “They run small,” said young Browne, “mostly ears and tails. They
have a tendency to displace objects to the rear of them, and a taste for
human flesh. They were born and brought up in the bazar, and their
morals are unspeakable. But you can’t get morals at any price in the
bazar; they are too expensive to be sold there. And there’s no real harm
in the bazar tat, if you only keep away from his heels and look a bit
spry when you get on.”

Mrs. Browne asked, with concealed anxiety, if there were no donkeys. She
was accustomed to a donkey, she said; she could ride one really rather
well, and if George didn’t mind she would so _much_ prefer it. But
George answered in a spirit of ribaldry. The only donkeys in India, he
said, belonged to the dhobies, and were permanently engaged in taking
home the wash. By that time they had arrived. It was only a sharp elbow
of a narrow mountain road, Rajpore, with its tumble-down houses,
overhanging it on both sides, and it was quite empty. “There aren’t any
horses here!” Helen remarked with disparagement.

“Wait,” returned her husband. Then, with really no particular emphasis,
he said, “Gorah!”[131] to Rajpore.

Footnote 131:

  Horse!

“_Ha, hazur!_”

“_Good_ pony, sahib!”

“Here iz, memsahib—here iz!”

Rajpore human on innumerable pairs of brown legs, turned suddenly into
the best and most spacious of its ground floors, dragging thence Rajpore
equine hostile on four, wearing an aggrieved expression above clinging
strands of country grass. They came, and still they came, from above
trotting down, from below trotting up. A human being of sorts was
usually attached to them, but Rajpore was obviously inhabited by ponies.
No other census would have been worth taking there. Mrs. Browne was
surrounded by ragged turbans and man-eaters. With Mr. Browne’s anxious
hand upon her arm she felt herself precipitated in every direction at
once. “I can’t keep out of the way of _all_ their heels, George,” she
exclaimed in the voice of the tried woman, and then George backed her
carefully against a wall, drew a semicircle round her with a diameter of
five feet, and forbade man or beast to cross the line. Then they
proceeded to a choice.

“Here iz, hazur! Good nice thin wallah, memsahib _kawasti_!”[132]

Footnote 132:

  For the memsahib.

“Thanks,” said Helen; “he’s a diagram! I want a fat one.”

“Look, memsahib! This one _bote_ plenty fat. _Rose_, _rose_, tarty
bun’nles ghas _khata_!”[133]

Footnote 133:

  Day by day he eats thirty bundles of grass!

“He’s a baote-tamasha-wallah,” remarked young Browne. “Look at his eye,
Helen. He also appears to have kicked all his skin off his fetlocks. For
you I should prefer the diagram.”

Finally it was the diagram for Helen, who commanded that an unreasonable
quantity of food should be given to it under her eyes, and remained
until it was finished. “If she isn’t fatter after that,” she said with
satisfaction, “it’s her own fault.” Young Browne selected the veritable
charger of Rajpore. He wore his mouth and nose carefully tied up in
rope, and might be relied upon at all points so long as that one
remained secure. “They’re not much of a pair,” said young Browne, “but
in _your_ animal, dear, I don’t mind sacrificing both speed and
appearances.”

“To safety. Yes, dear, you are _perfectly_ right.” And Mrs. Browne,
whose sense of humour was imperfectly developed, regarded her husband
with affection.

Thereafter it became a question of an ekka, and Rajpore had ekkas
bewildering in their variety and in their disrepair. If you have never
seen an ekka it will be difficult for you to understand one. The
business ekka does not stand about to be photographed, and therefore you
must be told that, although it appears to rest mainly on the horse’s
back, it has two wheels generally, one on each side. There is a popular
saying that no sahib likes a one-wheeled ekka, and though it is a
popular saying it is true. The vehicle will do prodigious distances with
one wheel, but it is anticipating Providence to engage it on that basis.
An ekka is rather like a very old two-storied birdcage tilted up and
fore-shortened, with a vaulted roof, and it runs in my mind that the
roof is frescoed. The upstanding little posts at the four corners are
certainly painted red and yellow; they are carved also, like the rungs
of certain chairs. I know that the ekka-wallah sits in the upper story
smiling upon the world. An ekka-wallah always smiles; his is a life of
ease. I know too that there are bulgings above and protuberances below,
and half a yard of dirty sacking, and seven pieces of ragged rope, and
always room for something else; but at this point my impression becomes
a little confused, and I cannot state with assurance which end is
attached to the horse. That, however, is a matter of detail. The real
point is that the Brownes found an ekka apparently two feet square,
which contracted to carry their luggage, bedding, tiffin-basket, and
Kasi up to Chakrata and down to the plains for the sum of three rupees
per diem, which was extortionate. But the _pulthans_[134] were moving
down, and the sergeants’ wives would require many ekkas. They could
afford to wait for the sergeants’ wives. In expectation of these ladies
the ekka market was a solid unit and the Brownes succumbed before it.

Footnote 134:

  Regiments.

Next day they left Dehra, dropping the first of its October rose-leaves.
Thinking of the planter in his grave, Helen wondered how he could have
been so indifferent as to close his eyes wilfully and intentionally on
such a place. It was the morning, there was a sweet and pungent gaiety
in the air, the long road they had to travel stretched before them in
the pleasaunce of leaf-checkered sunshine. Little striped squirrels
played on the boles of the trees—they were English-looking trees—that
met over their heads. Young Browne thanked God audibly that they were
out of the region of palms and plantains.

Tiny green fly-catchers swung on the rushes of an occasional pool,
pink-breasted ring-doves sidled out of their way, thieving parrots flew
by sixes and sevens screaming up from the _kharif_ crops.[135] Very
green were the _kharif_ crops, with the rain still about their roots,
surging up under the lowest branches of the trees as far as these
travellers could see before them. But for the teeming luxuriance of
everything, the sense of breadth and brightness and the caressing sun,
it might have been a road in Devonshire. But for the wayfarers too.
There were neither smocks nor gigs; the ryot went by, chiefly dressed in
his own brown skin, urging his lean oxen; all the gentle cows had
curious humps between their shoulders. And here by the wayside they saw
the tiny dome of a battered white praying place, and there the square
slab of a Mahomedan tomb.

Footnote 135:

  Cold weather crops.

The sun grew hot as they scrambled with the road down to the bridge
across a broad river bed full of round white stones and boulders, with a
narrow shallow brown stream hurrying along the middle. Further away it
trickled into the Jumna; here it played with pebbles and crabs, but now
and then in the rains it brought the boulders down from the mountains
swirling, and threw stones at the Department of Public Works, and shook
the bridges. Looking one way as they crossed the bridge, it was a
piled-up picture, the blue hills massed behind, the big white stones
huddled and stranded in the glistening grey sand, the foolish little
stream in the middle. Looking the other, the picture went to pieces, the
hills sloped further away, the sky came down, the big stones rounded
themselves into little ones, and spread indistinguishably far. Either
way it was beautiful in the crisp Indian sunlight; it had a gay
untroubled life, like porcelain.

After that there were miles of irresponsible curving, weedy road, that
led them sometimes past the sirkar’s[136] sarl forest, and sometimes
past a little village gathered together under a mango-tree, but oftenest
it straggled through wide, sunny, stony country, full of pale
half-tints, where only wild grasses grew. Such tall wild grasses, purple
and yellow and white, bending and tufting above their heads on either
side of the way. “They would make Aunt Plovtree happy for life,” Helen
said. They would indeed, and many another estimable lady resident in
Great Britain. It was a sorrowful waste that they should be growing
there far from the solemn interiors that yearned for their dusty charms.
Helen was so much of this opinion that she dismounted and gathered a
bunch, compelling her husband to do the same, to send by parcel post to
Aunt Plovtree. She flicked the flies off the Diagram’s ears with them
for three miles, then she lost a third of them in a canter, and young
Browne arranged that the rest should be carefully forgotten at Kalsi
dâk-bungalow. He was of opinion that in undertaking an ascent of nine
thousand feet on a bazar tat in India you couldn’t be expected to gather
and preserve wild grasses for your aunt in England.

Footnote 136:

  Government’s.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              CHAPTER XXV.


[Illustration: Decoration]


ALL night long the Jumna purred in their ears, rolling over the stones
at the bottom of the shady hill, whereon the Raj had built a travellers’
rest. Looking out through the dewy branches in the morning, they saw the
Doon lying under its mists at their feet, with the ragged Siwalliks on
the other side—already they had begun to climb. Already, too, there was
the mountain scent in the air—that smell of wet mossy rock and ferns and
running streams and vigour—and this, as they set forth upon the
Himalayas, with their faces turned upwards, took possession of their
senses and made them altogether joyous. The Rajpore charger sniffed the
wind with his Roman nose as copiously as circumstances would permit, and
snapped viciously at young Browne’s trousers with his retreating
under-lip. The Rajpore charger must have been at least twelve hands
high, and fat out of all proportion. His syce and proprietor,
Boophal—probably thirteen years old, wearing a ragged cloth jacket, a
dhoty, and an expression of precocious iniquity, was very proud of him.
The syce attached to Helen’s pony was visibly abased by the contrast,
and Helen herself declared loudly against the injustice of being
expected to keep up under the circumstances. Mrs. Browne’s mount had
only one idea of going, and that was to imitate the gait of her
distinguished friend in front at a considerable distance to the rear;
and there is no doubt that it must have been trying invariably to come
up puffing, to the reproaches of a waiting lord, complacent in his
saddle. “If you could ride behind for awhile and beat it,” suggested
Helen; “it doesn’t seem to mind me.” But young Browne thought that was
quite impossible. There was one thing they _might_ do, though—at Saia
they might get her a spur! “George!” cried she, “do you think I would
use a spur?—horrid, cruel thing, that you never can tell when it’s going
in!” with ungrammatical emotion. “But we might change ponies for a bit,
if you like.”

“We might,” said young Browne, reflectively, “but I don’t think that I
should feel justified in putting you on this one, my dear; his rage and
fury with his nose are awful.”

“But, George, I should like to ride _beside_ you!”

“Not more than I should like to have you, dear. But I think, since I
can’t have that pleasure, what a satisfaction I take in the knowledge
that you are _safe_. Do you feel disposed to trot?”

“_I_ do,” returned Mrs. Browne, with plaintive emphasis; “but you’ll
have to start, please. What is the matter with this animal?”

The Diagram was neighing—long, shrill neighs of presagement, with her
ears cocked forward. “Something’s coming,” said young Browne.
“_Dâk-wallahata!_”[137] remarked Boophal. A faint jingling on the far
side of the nearest curve; the dâk-wallah had rounded it, and was upon
them, at a short, steady, unrelenting trot. The dâk-wallah, all in
khaki, had charge of Her Majesty’s mails. There was no time for a
salaam. He wore bells at his waist for premonition, and a spear over his
shoulder for defence. These hills were full of _janwas_[138] without
special respect for Her Majesty’s mails. On he went, jingling faint and
fainter, bearing the news of the mountains down into the valleys, a
pleasant primitive figure of the pleasant primitive East. Young Browne
liked him particularly. “What a decent way of earning one’s living!”
said he.

Footnote 137:

  The postman comes.

Footnote 138:

  Animals.

The hills began to round out nobly before them now. The road took great
sweeps and curves, always penetrating and climbing, and a low stone wall
made its appearance running along the outer edge. Over the wall they
looked down upon a hurrying river and tree-tops; but the hill-sides
towered straight up beside them, lost in sarl, and oak, and mosses, and
shadows. They had climbed a very little way. The stillness seemed to
grow with the sunshine. Only now and then a jungle-fowl stirred, or a
hoo-poe cried, or they heard the trickling of a tiny stream that made
its ferny way down the face of the rock to the road. Underneath the warm
air lay always the cool scent; strange flowers bloomed in it, but did
not change it; it was the goodly smell of the mountains, and Helen,
respiring it, declared that it was the first time her nose had been the
slightest pleasure to her in India. They turned to look back—the hills
had grown up around them and shut them in; they were upon the solitary,
engirdling road, with its low stone parapet below unknown heights, above
unknown depths, insisting always upwards round the nearer masses to
hills that were greater, further, bluer. It was the little parapet,
Helen decided, that made it look so lonely. It must have taken
quantities of people to build the little parapet along such mighty
curves, and now they had all gone away down the road, and it seemed as
if none of them would ever come back.

After the dâk-wallah the _jogi_[139] with his matted hair and furtive
eyes. He asked nothing of the Brownes, the jogi, he extracted pice from
his own people, for the good of their souls; the souls of the Brownes
were past paying for; besides, it was so unlikely that a sahib would
pay. And after the jogi came a score of black, long-haired, long-horned
buffaloes, and a man seated upon an ass driving them. The buffaloes had
evidently never seen anything approaching a Browne before, for they all
with one accord stood quite still when they came within twenty yards of
these two, and stared with the stolidly resentful surprise that never
strikes one as an affectation in a buffalo. There were so very many
buffaloes and so very few Brownes and so little room for any of them
that the situation was awkward. “Keep close behind me and stick to the
inside,” young Browne enjoined his lady. “They _have_ been known to
charge at things they don’t understand, but they take a good while to
make up their minds.”

Footnote 139:

  Religious beggar.

[Illustration: HE ASKED NOTHING OF THE BROWNES.]

“Do let’s try to squeeze past before they make them up,” said Helen
nervously; but as the Brownes circumspectly advanced each of the small
syces ran out from behind his pony’s heels, and laying hold of the
buffaloes by any horn, ear, or tail that came nearest, jostled them
intrepidly out of the way. And there was a deeper humiliation to come.
As they took their right of way at a trot with what dignity they might,
a buffalo calf, a highly idiotic baby bull, overcome by the dazzling
appearance of the Rajpore charger, turned round and trotted after him
and would not be denied. In vain young Browne smote him upon the nose,
in vain he who sat upon the ass abused with a loud voice the ancestors
of all buffaloes, the little bull fixed upon the charger a look which
said, “Entreat me not to leave thee,” and lumbered steadfastly
alongside. Already the little bull’s mamma, smelling desertion from the
rear, had looked round inquiringly—she was in process of turning—she was
after them horns down, tail straight out, and she was coming fast! There
was very little time for reflection, but it occurred irresistibly to
both the Brownes that the little bull’s mamma would not be likely to put
the blame upon the little bull. There was nothing for it but flight,
therefore, and they fled; promiscuous and fast, for even the ponies
appeared to understand that it was an unpleasant thing to be pursued by
an enraged female buffalo for the restitution of maternal rights. First
the flying Brownes, neck and neck exhorting each other to calmness, then
the bleating calf that chased the flying Brownes, then the snorting cow
that chased the bleating calf, and, finally, he upon the ass who chased
them all, with shouts and brayings to wake the mountainside. It was a
scene for the imperishable plate of a Kodak: there was hardly time to
take it with the imagination. As his ideal departed from him the calf
fell back into the hands, as it were, of his mother and his master; and
young Browne, glancing behind, declared with relief that they were both
licking him.

They stopped to rest, to consume quantities of bread and butter and
hard-boiled eggs, to ask milk of an out-cropping village. Milk was
plentiful in the village, cool creamy buffaloes’ milk, and the price was
small, but from what vessel should the sahib drink it? All the round
brass bowls that held it were sacred to the feeding of themselves,
sacred to personalities worth about four pice each; and the lips of a
sahib might not defile them. The outcast sahib bought a new little
earthen pot for a pice, breaking it solemnly on a stone when they had
finished; and even mixed with the taste of fired mud the buffaloes’ milk
was ambrosial.

On they went and up, the trees shelved further down below and grew
scantier above; upon the heights that rose before them there seemed to
be none at all. Down where the river was evening had fallen, and all the
hills behind stood in purple, but a little white cluster still shone
sunlit in a notch above them. Boophal pointed it out. “_Tin cos_,”[140]
said Boophal. They hastened on at that, all six of them; they rounded a
last flank, rattled over a bridge with a foaming torrent underneath, and
found themselves clinging, with several fowls, oxen, and people, to the
side of the gorge the torrent made. The dâk-bungalow sat on a ledge a
hundred feet or so further up, and the Brownes felt this to be
excessive. They climbed it, however, and entered into peace at the top.
There was a khansamah and two long chairs, there would be dinner. The
Diagram, unsaddled and fed, folded herself up like a chest of drawers
for repose; but the charger roamed up and down seeking something to
kick, and all night long at intervals they heard him chewing in
imagination the cud of the buffalo calf, neighing, yawning, biting his
under-lip.

Footnote 140:

  Three miles.

Next day they saw what the creeping road had conquered, and what it had
yet to conquer. It was no longer question of climbing the great hills,
they were amongst the summits, they walked upon the heights, behind them
slope after outlying slope rose up and barred the way that they had
come; and yet the parapeted road, with its endless loops and curves
insisted upward, and the little military slabs that stood by the
mountainside told them that they had still eighteen, seventeen, sixteen
miles to follow it before they came to Chakrata, whence they should see
the Snows. Helen found it difficult to believe that the next turn would
not disclose them, that they were not lying fair and shining beyond that
brown mountain before her to the left—it was such a prodigious mountain,
it must be the last. But always the belting road sloped upward and
disappeared again, always behind the prodigious brown mountain rose a
more prodigious brown mountain still. They had astounding,
soul-stretching views, these Brownes, but always around and behind them;
before them rose ever the bulk of a single mountain, and the line of the
climbing girdling road.

When God gave men tongues, he never dreamed that they would want to talk
about the Himalayas; there are consequently no words in the world to do
it with. It is given to some of us, as it was given to these Brownes,
thus to creep and to climb up into the heart of them, to look down over
their awful verges and out upon the immensity of their slopes, to be
solitary in the stupendous surging, heaving mountain-sea that stands
mute and vast here upon the edge of the plains of India. Afterward these
people have more privacy than the rest of the world, for they have once
been quite alone in it, with perhaps a near boulder and a dragon-fly.
And their privacy is the more complete because there is no password to
let another in—language will not compass it. So they either babble
foolishly, or are silent.

The Brownes, in the fulness of their hearts, babbled foolishly. They
wondered whether the white speck near the top of the mountain across the
ravine was a cow or a house, and in either case how it held on. They
wondered what the curious blood-red crop could be, that lay in little
square patches far below them on the lower slopes where people had tiny
farms. They wondered how cold it was up there in the winter—it was jolly
cold now when you faced the wind. They found ox-eyed daisies and other
Christian flowers growing in clefts of the rock, and they gathered these
rejoicing. They implored each other to “keep to the inside” in places
where the low stone wall had been washed away, and neither of them dared
to look over. And they had an adventure which to this day Mrs. Browne
relates as blood-curdling.

It was in rounding an old sunny corner in silent disappointment at again
failing to find Chakrata. Young Browne, riding first, noticed a loose
pebble rattle down the side of the rock. Mrs. Browne insists that she
did not notice the pebble, and I don’t know that it is important to her
evidence that she should. But she certainly noticed the leopard, so
carefully that she never will be _quite_ sure it wasn’t a tiger. She saw
it rise from its four legs from a ledge of rock above young Browne’s
head and look at young Browne. Mrs. Browne is naturally unable to give
anyone an accurate idea of her emotion during the instant that followed,
but she was perfectly certain that it did not occur to young Browne to
transfix the animal with his eye, and he had nothing else. Neither it
did, but the situation did not find Mr. Browne entirely without presence
of mind notwithstanding. Raising his whip in a threatening manner Mr.
Browne said “Shoo!” and whatever may have been the value of that
expletive in Mr. Browne’s mouth under ordinary circumstances, in Mrs.
Browne’s opinion it saved his life on that occasion. For without even an
answering growl the leopard turned and trotted into the thicket quickly,
as if she had forgotten something.

“Did you see that, Helen?” inquired her husband, turning in his saddle.

“I sh-should think I did?” exclaimed Mrs. Browne. “_W-w-w-wait_ for me,
George!” And as the Diagram came up alongside, young Browne received
several tearful embraces, chiefly upon his arm, in the presence of the
syces. “I told you you ought to have a g-g-gun, darling, and you
_wouldn’t_ be advised,” Mrs. Browne reproached him hysterically. “It’s
all very well to laugh, but thin-thin-think of what _might_ have been!”

“It’s awful to think of what might have been if I had had a gun,” said
young Browne solemnly. “In the excitement of the moment I should have
been certain to let it go off, and then she would have been down on us,
sure. They hate guns awfully. Oh, we may be thankful I hadn’t a gun!”

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XXVI.


PRESENTLY they met a wonderfully pretty lady with red cheeks, such red
cheeks as all the Miss Peacheys had in Canbury, being swung along in a
dandy on the shoulders of four stout coolies. The red cheeks belonged to
Chakrata; they were within half a mile of it then; they would see it
before the sun went down. The road zig-zagged a bit and climbed more
steeply, narrowing hideously here and there. The khuds became terrific.
Young Browne dismounted and walked at his wife’s bridle, pushing her
pony close to the mountainside. The precipices seemed to shout to them.

There was a last outstanding brown flank; the road hurtled round it,
over it, and then with the greeting of a mighty torrent of wind that
seemed to come from the other side of the world it ran out upon a wide
level place, where a band played and five hundred soldiers, in Her
Majesty’s red, wheeled and marched and countermarched, it seemed to the
Brownes, for pure light-heartedness. That was the end; there, grouped
all about a crag or two, was Chakrata. There across a vast heaving of
mountains to the horizon—mountains that sank at their feet and swelled
again and again and again purple and blue—stood the still wonder of the
Snows.

“They aren’t real,” said Helen simply, “they’re painted on the sky.”

The Brownes followed a path that twisted through Chakrata, and in course
of time they came to a little out-cropping wooden diamond-paned chalet,
with wide brown eaves that overhung eternity and looked toward the
Snows. It was a tiny toy dâk-bungalow, and English dahlias, red and
purple and yellow and white, grew in clumps and thickets tall and wild
around it. Here they entered in and demanded a great fire and a cake;
while a grey furred cloud, flying low with her sisters, blotted out the
Snows, and darkness, coming up from the valleys, caught them upon the
mountain-top.

Distinct and unusual joys awaited them in the morning. The fire had gone
out for one thing, and they shivered luxurious shivers at the prospect
of getting up without one. They enjoyed every shiver and prolonged it.
How little one thought of being thankful for that sort of thing in
England, Helen remarked, with little sniffs at the frosty air; and young
Browne said “No, by Jove,” and how one hated the idea of one’s tub. Oh,
delightfully cold it was, snapping cold, squeaking cold! Helen showed
her hands blue after washing them, and they tumbled through their
respective toilettes like a couple of school children. It was so long
since they had been cold before.

At breakfast the butter was chippy, and that in itself was a ravishing
thing. At what time of year, they asked each other, would butter ever
stand alone without ice in Bengal. And their fingers were numb—actually
numb; could anything have been more agreeable, except to sit in the sun
on the little veranda, as they afterwards did, and get them warm again!
There, without moving, they could watch that magical drifted white
picture in the sky, so pure as to be beyond all painting, so lifted up
as to be beyond all imagination. A ragged walnut-tree clung to the edge
of the cliff; the wind shook the last of its blackening leaves; the
vast, wheeling sky was blue and empty, except of the Snows, and the
dahlias had trooped to the verge to look, so that the sun shone through
their petals with the light of wine. It is their remoteness, their
unapproachableness, that make these Himalayan Snows a sanctuary. From
the foot of man anywhere they are prodigiously far off, so that they
look to him always the country of a dream just hanging above the world
he knows, or if he be of prayerful mind, the Habitation of the Holiness
of the Lord. And since it is permitted to us that by mountain and by
valley we may journey to look upon the Snows, even from very far off,
our souls do not perish utterly in India, and our exile is not entirely
without its possession.

The Brownes had only two days in Chakrata, which they employed chiefly
as I have mentioned—sitting in the sun devout before the Himalayas, or
ecstatically blowing upon their fingers. They made one expedition to see
a pair of friends whom the merciful decree of Providence had recently
brought up from the Plains for good, and found them laying in coal and
flour for the winter, which made them quite silent for a moment with
suppressed feeling. “I hope,” said young Browne flippantly, to conceal
his emotion, “that on the event of other stores giving out you have
plenty of candles. They are sustaining in an emergency.”

And as they made their thoughtful way on pony-back to the brown wooden
chalet, Helen observed upon her riding habit some clustering spots of
white, that multiplied and thickened, and she gathered them up between
her fingers with a delighted cry. “George, dearest, look! We’re being
_snowed on_—in India!”

All of which was doubtless very trivial, but they were not remarkable
people, these Brownes; from the first I told you so.

[Illustration: THE SNOWS.]

And though they found this journey of theirs brimful of the
extraordinary, the unparalleled, there was really only one remarkable
thing about it, which was the dignified and self-reliant conduct of the
ekka. The ekka had always gone before, overflowing with their goods and
crowned with Kasi in cross-legged pomp. They had traced its wavering
progress by ends of ravelled rope, and splinters of wood, and scraps of
worn-out leather which lay behind in the road to testify of it; and
grave as had been their apprehensions, they had never overtaken it in a
state of collapse. Invariably when they arrived they found the ekka
disburthened, tipped up under a tree, the ekka pony browsing with a good
conscience, Kasi awaiting with an air which asked for congratulation.
How it held together was a miracle which repeated itself hourly; but it
did hold together, and inspired such confidence in young Browne that he
proposed, when she tired of the Diagram, to deposit Mrs. Browne in the
ekka also. This, however, was declined. Mrs. Browne said that she had
neither the heart nor the nerves for it; in which case, of course, an
emergency would find her quite anatomically unprepared.

Leaving the Snows with grief, therefore, they left the ekka with
trusting faith. There had been a hitch in the process of packing,
examination, consultation. The sahib, inquiring, had been told that one
of the wheels was “a little sick.” It was an excellent ekka—an ekka with
all the qualities; the other wheel was quite new, and you did not often
find an ekka with an entirely new wheel! But the other was certainly a
little old, and after these many miles a little sick. Young Browne
diagnosed the suffering wheel, and made a serious report; there were
internal complications, and the tire had already been off seven times.
Besides, it wouldn’t stand up; obviously it was not shamming, the
_purana chucker_[141] was taken bad, very bad indeed. Its cure could be
accomplished, however, with wet chips and a hammer—and time. If the
sahib would permit, the ekka would follow in half an hour.

Footnote 141:

  Old wheel.

So the Brownes departed gaily, and an hour and three-quarters later the
ekka tottered forth also, with Kasi and the ekka-wallah walking
lamentably alongside exchanging compliments upon the subject of the
wheel. They travelled three miles and an hour thus, and then the wheel
had a sudden relapse, with signs of dissolution; while young Browne’s
dressing-case, which happened to be on top, shot precipitately first
into space and then into the topmost branches of a wild cherry-tree
growing three thousand feet down the khud. The ekka pony planted his
feet in the road-bed and looked round for directions; the ekka-wallah
groaned and sat down. “And the sahib, O, my brother-in-law!” exclaimed
Kasi, dancing round the ekka.

“The sahib is in the hand of God!” returned the ekka-wallah piously.
“To-day I have been much troubled. I will smoke.” And while the Brownes,
at Saia, remotely lower down, grew chilly with vain watching in the
shadows that lengthened through the khuds, the weary ekka leaned
peacefully against the mountain wall, the ekka-wallah drew long comfort
from his hubble-bubble, and Kasi reposed also by the wayside, chewing
the pungent betel, and thinking, with a meditative eye on the wild
cherry-tree below, hard things of fate.

Nevertheless, without the direct interposition of Providence, the ekka
eventually arrived, and there was peace in one end of the dâk-bungalow,
and the crackling of sarl branches, and the simmering of tinned
hotch-potch. In the other end was wrath, and a pair of Royal Engineers—a
big Royal Engineer and a little Royal Engineer. To understand why wrath
should abide with these two Royal Engineers in their end of the
bungalow, it is necessary to understand that it was not an ordinary
travellers’ bungalow, but a “Military Works’” bungalow, their very own
bungalow, for “Military Works” and “Royal Engineers” mean the same
thing; and that ordinary travellers were only allowed to take shelter
there by special permission or under stress of weather. By their proper
rights, therefore, these Royal Engineers should have had both ends of
the bungalow, and the middle, and the compound, and the village, and a
few miles of the road north and south—and a little privacy. If these
ideas seem a trifle large, it becomes necessary to try to understand, at
least approximately, what a Royal Engineer is, where he comes from, to
what dignities and emoluments he may aspire. And then, when we have
looked upon the buttons which reflect his shining past, and considered
the breadth of his shoulders and the straightness of his legs, and the
probable expense he has been as a whole to his parents and his country,
we will easily bring ourselves to admit that he is entirely right in
considering himself quite the most swagger article in ordinary
Government service in India. We may even share his pardonable
incredulity as to whether before his advent India was at all. And
certainly we will sympathise with the haughtily impatient expletives
with which he would naturally greet pretensions to circumscribe his
vested rights in the Himalayan mountains on the part of two absurdly
unimportant and superfluous Brownes.

The Brownes in their end heard the two Royal Engineers kicking the fire
logs in theirs, and conversing with that brevity and suppression which
always marks a Royal Engineer under circumstances where ordinary people
would be abusively fluent. Apparently they had command of themselves,
they were Royal Engineers, they weren’t saying much, but it was vigorous
the way they kicked the fire. The Brownes were still as mice, and
absorbed their soup with hearts that grew ever heavier with a grievous
sense of wrong inflicted not only upon their neighbour but upon a Royal
Engineer!

“As a matter of fact, you know,” said young Browne, “we’ve no business
here. I think I ought to go and speak to them.”

“We’ve got permission,” remarked Mrs. Browne feebly, “and we were here
first.”

“I’m afraid,” said young Browne, “that we have the best end, and we’ve
certainly got the lamp. Maybe they would like the lamp. I think I ought
first to go and see them. After all, it’s their bungalow.”

Young Browne came back presently twisting the end of his moustache. It
was an unconscious imitation of the Royal Engineers acquired during
their short and embarrassed interview.

“Well?” said Helen.

“Oh, it’s all right. They don’t particularly mind. They accepted my
apology—confound them! And they _would_ like the lamp—their’s smokes.
They’re marching, like us, down to Saharanpore, inspecting the road or
something, and fishing. No end of a good time those chaps have.”

“What are their names?”

“Haven’t the least idea—they’re Royal Engineers.”

“Well,” returned Mrs. Browne disconsolately, “what are we to do when you
give them the buttie?”

“Go to bed,” returned her lord laconically.

Mrs. Browne prepared, therefore, for repose, and while Mr. Browne
yielded up the lamp there reached her from the other end of the bungalow
the ineffable condescension of a Royal Engineer, who said “Thanks
awfully.”

They were gone in the morning; the Brownes heard from the khansamah that
the burra-sahibs had departed at daylight, and the very burra of the
burra-sahibs rode a white horse. The Brownes were glad these
particularly burra-sahibs had gone; they found they preferred to be
entertained by the Military Works Department in the abstract. “They
probably mean to ride a long way to-day, starting so early,” said Helen
hopefully. “We won’t find them at Futtehpore.” It was unreasonable in
the Brownes; they had no grievance against these Royal Engineers, and
yet they desired exceedingly that somewhere, anywhere, their ways should
diverge; and there is no doubt whatever that the Royal Engineers would
have heartily recommended a change of route to the Brownes.
Unfortunately there was only one, and it lay before them unravelling
down among the hills to Futtehpore. It was such glorious cantering,
though, that these inconsiderable civil little Brownes on their bazar
tats, all agog with their holiday, almost forgot the possible recurrence
of the Royal Engineer. He became a small cloud on the horizon of their
joyous day; he would probably vanish before evening. So that the sun
shone and the doves cooed and the crested hoo-poe ran across the path,
of what import was a Royal Engineer—or even two? So the Brownes rode
valiantly down among the hills, she upon her Diagram and he upon the
charger of Rajpore, and when they really went with wings and glory, the
syce-boys running behind attached themselves to the tails of the Diagram
and the charger of Rajpore respectively, relieving their own legs and
adding greatly to the imposing character of the cavalcade. And so they
went down, down, where purple-veined begonias grew beside the course of
the springs, and tall trees fluttered their ghostly white leaves over
the verge, and orchids bloomed on dead branches up overhead. As they
went they met an invalid being taken to Chakrata for change of air and
scene. He rode in a dandy evidently made for his special accommodation,
carried by two coolies; and a chuprassie attended him, a beautiful
chuprassie with a red sash and a medal. The invalid looked at the
Brownes in a way that asked their solicitude, but he made them no
salutation because he was only a big brown and white mastiff, and
besides, he didn’t feel up to promiscuous conversation with strangers
who might or might not be desirable. But when young Browne stopped the
chuprassie and the coolies, and called him “old fellow” and asked him
where he was going and how he had stood the journey, he gave young
Browne a paw and a depreciating turn of his head over the dandy which
distinctly said, “Liver complications. We all come to it. Your turn next
hot weather. This country isn’t fit for a Christian to live in!” and one
more homesick alien passed on to look for his lost well-being in the
Hills. Mrs. Browne hoped he would find it, he was such a dear dog.

[Illustration: LIVER COMPLICATIONS—WE ALL COME TO IT.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             CHAPTER XXVII


THE Brownes had left the sunset behind them red upon the heights when
they reached Futtehpore, but there was still light enough for them to
descry a white horse from afar, browsing in the compound, and they
looked at each other in unaffected melancholy, saying, “They’re here.”
If they wanted further evidence they had it in the person of the
khansamah, who ran forth wagging his beard, and exclaiming that there
was no room—how should there be any room for these Presences from
without, when two Engineer-sahibs had already come! Among his other
duties one Engineer-sahib had to report the shortcomings of this
khansamah. Should it be written among them that the Engineer-sahib was
rendered uncomfortable in his own house! Ah, that the Presence could be
persuaded that there was another bungalow five miles further on, which
the Presence knew perfectly well there was not.

“Khansamah,” replied young Browne, “two sahibs do not require four
apartments and all the beds. Go and make it right; and, look you, bring
a long chair for the memsahib that thy back be not smitten,” for by this
time the heart of George Browne, of Macintyre and Macintyre’s, Calcutta,
had waxed hot within him by reason of Royal Engineers.

The khansamah returned presently and announced that the Presences might
have beds, but a long chair—here the khansamah held his back well behind
him that it should not be smitten—he could not give, for the burra
Engineer-sahib sat upon the one, and the chota Engineer-sahib sat upon
the other. Yes, they could have something to eat, when the
Engineer-sahibs had dined; but there would not be time to prepare it
before—the Engineer-sahibs had commanded dinner in one hour. He would
see if a fire was possible—it might be that the Engineer-sahibs required
all the dry wood. It was presently obvious that they did, and as young
Browne and Kasi struggled unavailingly with an armful of green sari and
a year-old copy of the _Overland Mail_, that gentleman might have been
overheard to remark roundly in the smoke and the gloom, “_Damn_ the
Engineer-sahibs!”

Next morning the white horse was still in the stable when young Browne
stepped out upon the veranda, and the Royal Engineer stood there smoking
with his hands in his pockets, his legs describing a Royal Engineering
angle. He said “Morning!” with a certain affability to young Browne, who
made a lukewarm response.

“Think of getting on to-day?” inquired the R. E.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Browne replied. “We must. We’re due at Saharanpore
Friday.”

“Aw! same with us. Bagshiabag to-day, Kalsia to-morrow, Saharanpore
Friday.”

“Exactly our programme,” said young Browne with firmness.

“Aw! Hown’ for’tchnit!”

“Is it?”

“Well, yes, rather. Y’see it was all right at Saia, and it’s all right
here, but at Kalsia there’ll be Mrs. Prinny of the 97th, and Mrs.
Prinny’s got baby, and baby’s got nurse. That’ll be rather tight,
_waoun’t_ it?” and the Royal Engineer removed a cigar ash from his
pyjamas.

“Now if either of us should push on to Kalsia to-day,” he continued
insinuatingly.

There was a pause.

“It’s awkward for _us_, y’see,” continued the R. E., “because we’re
fishing.”

“How far is it?”

“’Bout twenty-six miles.”

“H’m! Rather long march for a lady.”

“Oh, yes—it would be _long_,” responded the Royal Engineer with an
irresponsible air, “but then think of that awful nurse an’ baby.”

A quarter of an hour later the Brownes were off again. Crossing a bridge
they passed the two Royal Engineers sitting upon one of the buttresses
examining their fishing tackle. “We’re going to see if we can manage
it,” remarked young Browne. “Good morning.”

The larger and finer of the Royal Engineers looked up. “Aw,” said he,
“mustn’t over-do it, y’know.”

“We won’t,” returned young Browne.

As a matter of fact they didn’t. Arrived at Bagshiabag, Mrs. Browne
declared herself very nearly dead, the Diagram had been more
diagrammatic than usual. She would rest, and “see” if she felt equal to
going on.

“I’m blowed if you shall,” said her lord, “not for all the R. E.’s in
Asia.” So they peacefully put up in their choice of ends this time, and
made an impartial division of the furniture, and after tea went for a
walk. It was the very last station on the edge of the hills; the plains
began at their very feet to roll away into unbroken, illimitable misty
distances. Bagshiabag—the King’s garden—the palm-fringed plains that
were doubtless fair in the King’s sight. The Brownes looked at them
sorrowing; it requires an Oriental imagination to admire the King’s
garden from an inside point of view.

“We must start early to-morrow,” said young Browne regretfully. “It will
be hot.”

Returning they found the two Royal Engineers refreshing themselves under
a mango-tree in the compound, surrounded by everything that appertained
to the establishment, and wearing an expression of god-like injury. “We
didn’t get on, after all,” said young Browne, as he passed them with
what countenance he could. The Royal Engineers looked at him and smiled
a rectilinear smile. “No,” they said. It was not much to say, but there
was a compulsion in it that awoke the Brownes before daylight next
morning and put them in their saddles at sunrise. By ten o’clock the
last blue ridge had faded out of the sky-line, by eleven they were in
Kalsia—not Kalsi of the Doon—in the midst of a great flatness. The ekka
with the tiffin-basket was behind upon the road. They would wait there
till it came, and then make up their minds about pushing on to
Saharanpore. The lady with the nurse and baby was no fiction; she was
coming by dâk-gharry at three o’clock, the khansamah said. And could the
Presence give him any tidings of the Engineer-sahibs who were on the
way? He had been in readiness for the Engineer-sahibs these three days.
The Presence could give him no tidings whatever of the Engineer-sahibs.
He thought very likely they were dead. Numbers of people had died in
India in the last three days, and the Presence assuredly did not wish
any talk of the Engineer-sahibs. “What is there to eat?” asked the
Presence. And if there was only milk and eggs and chupatties—the sahibs
generally bringing their own food to this place—then let it be served
instantly, to be in readiness when the ekka should appear. And it was
served. But the khansamah had lived a great many years upon the earth,
and, moreover, he had privately questioned the syce-boys, so that he
knew of the coming of the Engineer-sahibs. He knew, too, that it would
not be good, either for his temporal or his eternal happiness, that the
Engineer-sahibs should find four people and a baby in their house when
they arrived. Therefore the khansamah, being full of guile as of years,
sent an open-faced one privily to the turning of the lane into the road,
who gave word to Kasi and to the ekka-wallah that the sahibs—the Browne
sahibs—had gone on to Saharanpore, and they were by no means to tarry at
Kalsia, but to hasten on after. Believing this word, Kasi and the
ekka-wallah, while the Brownes famished upon the veranda, were drawing
ever nearer to Saharanpore.

It is difficult to make a meal of eggs and milk and chupatties, but the
Brownes found that it could be done, even when because of anger it is
the more indigestible. They found an unexpected and delightful solace,
however, afterward in Saharanpore. The place was full of the southward
bound, a regiment was on the move, all Mussoorie had emptied itself in
dâk-gharries upon the station. Nevertheless, Kasi the invaluable had
intrigued for a room for them, a room that opened upon a veranda, with a
lamp in it, and a smoking dinner. Kasi was the more invaluable for being
conscience-stricken at having swallowed false talk. And there is no
Military Works bungalow in Saharanpore, which is a station built
primarily and almost wholly for the use of the general public. The joy
of these unregenerate Brownes, therefore, upon seeing a white horse
vainly walk up to this veranda and hearing a hungry voice, the voice of
the Royal Engineer, vainly inquire for rooms and dinner, was keen and
excessive.

“They’ve funked the baby after all!” said young Browne, “thinking we
wouldn’t. Now they’ll become acquainted with the emotions of the
ordinary travelling public in a congested district. Hope they’ll enjoy
’em as much as we did, Nellie. I’m going to have a bottle of beer.”

And if the Royal Engineer outside in the dark, where it was getting
chilly, could be susceptible to a note of triumph, he heard it in the
pop of the Pilsener with which on this occasion Mr. George Browne
fortified his opinion of Royal Engineers at large.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            CHAPTER XXVIII.


YOU might have read in this morning’s _Englishman_, in the list of
passengers booked per P. and O. steamer _Ganges_, sailing 3d April, “Mr.
and Mrs. Perth Macintyre and Miss Macalister, for Brindisi.” Miss
Macalister is a niece of the Perth Macintyres. She has been out two
years and a half, and, so far as her opportunities are concerned, we
have nothing to reproach ourselves with. For the first time in fifteen
years we have attended the subscription dances to take her, and did not
shirk the fancy dress ball, Mr. Perth Macintyre going as Falstaff, for
her sake. At our time of life this is a great deal of exertion for a
niece, and I consider, if such things are possible, Mr. Perth
Macintyre’s deceased sister ought to have felt gratification at what we
did. Nevertheless, I have not had occasion to mention Miss Macalister
before, and it is only in connection with her return-ticket that I
mention her now. It represents an outlay which we did not expect to be
obliged to make.

We are due in England about the 1st of May, when we will endeavour to
find the warmest south wall in Devonshire—I shiver at the thought—and
hang ourselves up on it. As the summer advances and the conditions of
temperature in Great Britain become less severe, we will make an effort
to visit the parental Peacheys in Canbury, if neither of us have
previously succumbed to influenza; in which case the box of chutneys and
guava jelly that the Brownes have charged us to deliver will be sent by
luggage train. The survivor—we expect there will be at least a temporary
survivor—is to attend to this.

It will make a difference to the Brownes, our going, the difference of a
junior partnership; and although I hope I have a correct idea of the
charms of our society, I fully expect that their grief at our departure
will be tempered by this consideration. Some one of our administrators
is always being quoted in the newspapers as having called India “a land
of regrets.” It is to be feared, however, that the regrets are felt
exclusively by those who are going. The satisfactions of retirement are
obscure, and the prospect of devoting a shrunken end of existence to the
solicitous avoidance of bronchitis is not inviting. Whereas it is always
to somebody’s profit that an Englishman leaves India, and he is so
accustomed to the irony of the idea of being his own chief mourner, that
he would suspect the deeply-afflicted at his going of more than the
usual manœuvres to obtain his shoes. The Brownes are very pleased,
undisguisedly very pleased, though Mrs. Browne has condoled with me
sincerely, in private, on the subject of Miss Macalister; and we quite
understand it.

There is nothing, on the other hand, to mitigate our regret at parting
with the Brownes, which is lively. I may not have been able to make it
plain in these few score pages, but I like the Brownes. They are nice
young people, and my advice has been so often useful to them. As the
wife of the junior partner in Macintyre and Macintyre’s, Mrs. Browne
will be obliged to depend upon her own for the future; but I am leaving
her a good deal to go on with, and a certain proportion of our
drawing-room furniture as well, which she will find equally useful. I
inherited it myself from Mrs. J. Macintyre; it has been a long time in
the firm. Further, we have put off sailing for a fortnight so that I can
be godmother in person to the Browne baby, for whose prospective future
I knitted fifteen pairs of socks this last cold weather; and that I
consider the final proof of our regard.

If it is necessary to explain my interest in these young Brownes, which
you, I regret to think, may find inexplicable, it lies, I dare say, as
much in this departure of ours as in anything else. Their first chapter
has been our last. When you turn down the page upon the Brownes you
close the book upon the Perth Macintyres, and it has been pleasant to me
that our story should find its end in the beginning of theirs. If this
is not excuse enough, there is a sentimental one besides. For I also
have seen a day when the spell of India was strong upon my youth, when I
saw romance under a turban and soft magic behind a palm, and found the
most fascinating occupation in life to be the wasting of my husband’s
substance among the gabbling thieves of the China bazar. It was all new
to me once—I had forgotten how new until I saw the old novelty in the
eyes of Helen Browne. Then I thought of reading the first pages of the
Anglo-Indian book again with those young eyes of hers; and as I have
read I have re-written, and interleaved, as you see. It may be that they
will give warning to some and encouragement to others. I don’t mind
confessing that to me they have brought chiefly a gay reminder of a time
when pretty little subalterns used to trip over their swords to dance
with young Mrs. Perth Macintyre also, which seems quite a ludicrous
thing to print—and that has been enough.

I think she will avoid the graver perils of memsahibship, Mrs. Browne. I
think she will always be a nice little woman. George and the baby will
take care of that. With the moderate social facilities of the wife of a
junior partner in Macintyre and Macintyre’s, she will not be likely even
to make the acquaintance of the occasional all-conquering lady who
floats on the surface of Anglo-Indian society disreputably fair, like
the Victoria Regia in the artificial lake of the Eden Gardens. As to the
emulation of such a one, I believe it is not in the power of
circumstances to suggest it to Mrs. Browne. Besides, she is not clever,
and the Victoria Regia must be clever, clever all round, besides having
a specialty in the souls of men.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Browne has become a memsahib, graduated, qualified,
sophisticated. That was inevitable. I have watched it come to pass with
a sense that it could not be prevented. She has lost her pretty colour,
that always goes first, and has gained a shadowy ring under each eye,
that always comes afterwards. She is thinner than she was, and has
acquired nerves and some petulance. Helen Peachey had the cerebral
placidity and good temper of one of Fra Angelico’s piping angels. To
make up, she dresses her hair more elaborately, and crowns it with a
little bonnet which is somewhat extravagantly “chic.” She has fallen
into a way of crossing her knees in a low chair that would horrify her
Aunt Plovtree, and a whole set of little feminine Anglo-Indian poses
have come to her naturally. There is a shade of assertion about her chin
that was not there in England, and her eyes—ah, the pity of this!—have
looked too straight into life to lower themselves as readily as they did
before. She has come into an empire among her husband’s bachelor
friends, to whom she will continue to give gracious little orders for
ten years yet, if she does not go off too shockingly; and her interests
have expanded to include a great many sub-masculine ones, which she
discusses with them in brief and casual sentences interspersed with
smiles that are a little tired. Without being actually slangy she takes
the easiest word and the shortest cut—in India we know only the
necessities of speech, we do not really talk, even in the cold weather.

[Illustration: SHE HAS FALLEN INTO A WAY OF CROSSING HER KNEES IN A LOW
CHAIR THAT WOULD HORRIFY HER AUNT PLOVTREE.]

Domesticity has slipped away from Mrs. Browne, though she held it very
tightly for a while, into the dusky hands whose business is with the
house of the sahib. She and young Browne and the baby continue to be
managed by Kasi with a skill that deceives them into thinking themselves
comfortable, and Helen continues to predict with confidence that next
month there will be a balance in her favour instead of Kasi’s. On the
contrary, the accounts will show that the Brownes have had all they
wanted to eat and drink, that the dhoby has been paid, the memsahib has
had a rupee’s worth of postage stamps, and there is one anna and six
pices to pay to Kasi.

It was a very little splash that submerged Mrs. Browne in Anglo-India,
and there is no longer a ripple to tell about it. I don’t know that life
has contracted much for her. I doubt if it was ever intended to hold
more than young Browne and the baby—but it has changed. Affairs that are
not young Browne’s or the baby’s touch her little. Her world is the
personal world of Anglo-India, and outside of it, except in affection of
Canbury, I believe she does not think at all. She is growing dull to
India, too, which is about as sad a thing as any. She sees no more the
supple savagery of the Pathan in the market-place, the bowed reverence
of the Mussulman praying in the sunset, the early morning mists lifting
among the domes and palms of the city. She has acquired for the Aryan
inhabitant a certain strong irritation, and she believes him to be nasty
in all his ways. This will sum up her impressions of India as completely
years hence as it does to-day. She is a memsahib like another.

Her mother still occasionally refers to the reports of the Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel that reach them in Canbury, and freely
supposes that the active interest her daughter took in Indian Missions
has increased and intensified in India. In reply, Helen is obliged to
take refuge in general terms, and has always discreetly refrained from
mentioning the prejudice that exists in Calcutta against Christian
cooks.

I hope she may not stay twenty-two years. Anglo-Indian tissues, material
and spiritual, are apt to turn in twenty-two years to a substance
somewhat resembling cork. And I hope she will not remember so many dead
faces as I do when she goes away—dead faces and palm fronds grey with
the powder of the wayside, and clamorous voices of the bazar crying,
“_Here iz! memsahib! Here iz!_”...

So let us go our several ways. This is a dusty world. We drop down the
river with the tide to-night. We shall not see the red tulip blossoms of
the silk cottons fall again.




------------------------------------------------------------------------




Transcriber’s note:

    ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.

    ○ Unpaired quotation marks were left as the author intended.

    ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

    ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a
      predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not
      changed.





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