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.
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