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.
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