[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.
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