Sara Jeannette Duncan

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”