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.]
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